Re: Seeking some advice and/or pointers as to getting into web-based java application dev using Struts
Disclaimer: I primarily do desktop apps in Java, not web pages, so I'm not
qualified to answer your question on Struts.
"NickName" <dadada@rock.com> wrote in message
"
0) OS
1) Java 2 Software Development Kit, version 1.4.1 or later
(downloadable from http://java.sun.com/j2se/downloads.html)
2) Tomcat 5.0.16 or later (from http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/)
3)Struts 1.1 or later, as obtained from
http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/
4) A powerful Java and JSP development tool such as JBuilder, WebSphere
Studio, or Eclipse (a free IDE downloadable from
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/)
5) SQL Server, Oracle, or another relational database accessible via
JDBC (database can be running locally or remotely)
"
[...]
2) This is the hosting server (web server) for application(s) developed
using num 1
Yes, but the fact that Tomcat was written in Java isn't very
significant. You could have had a webserver developped in C++ which might
have done the job just as well, or a different server written in Java which
doesn't support JSP or servlets at all.
[...]
4) This is the tool, e.g. JBuilder, that is used to develop app using
num 1 language within num 3 framework. Once an app is developed,
deploy it to num 2
Right. They're called IDEs, or Integrated Development Environments, and
most programmers will use one at some point in their career, if not during
the majority of their careers. You said you had a lot of experience in web
development. Can you elaborate on that? If you done ASP.NET, you must have
certainly ran across Visual Studio at some point. If you did mainly PHP,
then you might have got by with only notepad or textpad or some other simple
text editor. Basically, an IDE is a very, very, very fancy text-editor,
designed specifically for programming.
5) This is the backbone of any modern app (data, data, data stored in a
relational environment)
Most web-apps will use a database, yes, but most desktop apps won't. A
good hanful of them do, but I think the majority just use custom built data
structures.
[...]
1) What core java language elements/classes that I must get familar
with for my goal, understand, the java tutorial of HelloWorld etc. but
that does not really fit into what I intend to go after, for instance,
I don't care about how to creat a frame or like, for web app it would
be HTML form ...
To do web stuff with Java, you basically need to learn J2EE (Java 2
Enterprise Edition). Usually, we recommend people to get very comfortable
with J2SE (Java 2 Standard Edition) first, as it's easier to learn, and once
they become comfortable with J2SE, they can move on to J2EE. J2SE is mainly
for desktop apps though. If you want to somehow "skip" the J2SE stuff and
jump straight into J2EE, I'm not sure what the best path is for doing this.
[...]
4) Any other idea other than its online help doc?
If you're willing to spend the time to learn J2SE, you might want to use
the IDE known as BlueJ. BlueJ was designed for students learning Java, so it
should be fairly easy to use, but it's not very suitable for web
development. Once you learn how to use an IDE via BlueJ, you'll probably
have no problem figuring out Eclipse or any of the other IDEs.
5) How to get to more "meat" part of JDBC other than some simple query?
I don't think there is much more to JDBC than that. JDBC is basically a
standard so that you can write queries in a standardized way, and different
databases should all react the same way, as opposed to dealing with the
specific quirks of each DB individually. Assuming you know SQL, I don't
think you really need to know what's going under the hood to use it, anymore
than you'd need to know how NTFS works when you try to save a file to disk.
Note that JDBC is not itself the database. It's merely an adapter or
connector to a database. You'd still need to download and install, for
example, MySQL to actually host the data, and then use JDBC so that your
Java code can talk to the MySQL server.
- Oliver