This page contains some articles written by Bert Torfs.

'Struts Tutorial'

This article (Strutstt.zip) guides you through the steps necessary to start and (almost) finish a web application based on the Struts MVC framework. Sources are available here. Software used inludes

  • Eclipse 3.0
  • Sysdeo Tomcat Plugin
  • Struts (of course)
  • Ant
  • OsX - altough it does not really matter.

Topics covered include

  • MVC
  • Creating an empty Struts application
  • Automating the packaging and deployment process using Ant
  • Navigation between pages
  • Some basic Struts tags
  • Adding and removing items to and from a table (one page)
  • Declarative exception handling
  • Creating a search page
  • Making a search page truly reusable : variable forwards and variable bits of action.

Not yet covered is how to change the model implementation - currently a dumb java class - by a web service (or a session bean if you prefer) without having to touch the view or even the controller.

'J2EE On Mac OS X' (First article)

An article which you can download as a PDF file: (j2ee.pdf) (about 1.90 Megabytes). This article is a hands-on tutorial on installing, configuring and using some popular open source J2EE tools. Topics covered include :

  • Write HelloWorld using Eclipse
  • Create a HelloWorld session bean.
  • Make JBoss run inside Eclipse.
  • Deploy that session bean on JBoss and debug it.
  • Instal MySql on OS X
  • Create a database with some simple tables and data.
  • Generate entity beans and their deployment descriptors using Middlegen.
  • Make JBoss connect to MySql.
  • Deploy the entity beans on JBoss, and debug them using Eclipse.

New chapters added since februari 2, 2003

  • Installing Tomcat
  • Create a JSP
  • Debug a JSP
  • Using a servlet to control the flow of JSPs.

Please note that this article is a little out of date now : Eclipse is at version 3.01, JBoss at 4.0 and the Easy JBoss plugin became a part of MyEclipse and is no longer avaliable for free. You can replace it by the JBoss IDE plugin form JBoss themselves. When I have the time…

'J2EE On Mac OS X Part 2'

This article (j2ee2.pdf) only contains the chapters of the previous article that were added on februari 2nd 2003. If you already downloaded the first article before that date, you could do with this one only (1,2 Mb).