After learning and using Java though my 3 years of university, I haven't touched the stuff since. Not because I don't like it, just because I haven't needed to. After a meeting at work the other day I decided to pull my finger out and re-educate myself, particularly towards the enterprise stuff, which they didn't teach me at Uni. If they had I'd probably be loaded right now.

Finding a tutorial, I sat down at my desktop machine and set about creating my first J2EE application. I'm a big fan of Gentoo Linux and try to use it's portage package management as much as possible, making it easy to maintain my system, so rather than download JBoss like the tutorial says, I simply.

# emerge jboss

This went fine, as did firing up jboss and going to the console through my browser. Then I stumbled. Trying to invoke 'startDatabaseManager' wouldn't seem to work. It said it did, but the applet never appeared. An hour later, after customising the deploy XML file for HyperSonic, I was closer to having the database the way it needs to be, but still couldn't get the applet to fire up. I googled for a while and found a handful of people having the same problems, but never for the same reason. In the end I gave up.

The thing is, right now I'm interested in the J2EE side of things, not so much the database, so it's kind of annoying getting stuck so early. I'll spend some time tonight trying to access the HSQLDB another way, if not I'll try and adapt the tutorial to use MySQL!