Whew, it’s been a busy day for learning. Since the job offers aren’t yet coming in at a furious rate, I’m taking advantage of the time to cram more into my brain, especially in the area of enterprise Java programming, where I hope to nail down my next job. Today I installed Tomcat on my Powerbook (which lets me run Java Server Pages), installed ant (which automates a bunch of build chores), created a pretty basic JavaBean, created unit tests for that JavaBean, created an ant buildfile that compiles the code and runs the unit tests, caught and corrected an error in the JavaBean with the unit tests, and wrote a JSP to use the JavaBean in another context. The only significant speedbump was that I’m evidently an idiot, and can’t tell “CircleTest” from “TestCircle”.

While I’ve been reading lots of Java material for the past few weeks, and have worked through many of the included examples, there’s nothing like actually writing your own stuff from scratch to come to grips with a new set of material. (I must admit I love the frisson when things actually come together and work the way they’re supposed to.)

Many thanks to Kathy for running interference with the kids while I dug into brain-work.