Setting Up Working Environment

To start working on web application development, you need to download and install a set of tools and packages. You system must also be able to support a specific minimum requirements, see i) System Requirements.

If your system fulfill the minimum requirement, continue ii) Installing Prerequisite and Development Tools. Then, iii) Installing Web Server (Tomcat 6.0), and finally, prepare your tools with iv) Preparing Tools.

i) System Requirements

The followings are the minimum system requirements to develop web application:

• Operation System: Any Java Enable Operation System
• Memory: 512 MB
• Processor: 1.8 GHz Pentium 4
• Storage: 2 GB

This tutorial will use, however, Windows Vista Home Primium. You should choose the correct installer for the required tools and libraries depending on your operation system.

ii) Installing Prerequisite

Java is a main prerequisite for java based web application system, followed by ICEfaces library for API reference.

Java
You can use JDK 1.5 or later version, follow the steps to install JDK 1.5:

1. Go to java.sun.com
2. Accept License Agreement and select the jdk-1_5_0_17-windows-i586-p.exe to download
3. After download, click the installer file to execut
4. Continue the installation process following the wizard, it will take a few minutes to install JDK

ICEfaces
You have to download both ICEfaces libraries and Eclipse Plugin

1. Go to icefaces.org
2. Register user name and password for ICEFaces community
3. Then download both ICEfaces-1.7.2-SP1-bin.zip and ICEfaces-1.7.2-SP1-Eclipse-3.4-plugins.zip
   
4. Extract ICEfaces-1.7.2-SP1-bin.zip to the folder that you want to install, for instance: d:\icefaces. Keep the other file, eclipse plugins, to extract after eclipse is downloaded.

iii) Installing Web Server (Tomcat 6.0)
You can download Tomcat 6.0 or later version for web application server. The others web application server such as JBoss, GlassFish will also work the same.

1. You have to download both ICEfaces libraries and Eclipse Plugin
2. Go to tomcat.apache.org
3. Select Windows Service Installer from Binary Distributions list
4. Download and save apache-tomcat-6.0.18.exe
5. Double click the file to install after download is completed
6. Continue the installation process following the wizard

iv) Preparing Tools
You might a several tools in order to design and implement the web application. The following tools are optional and do not required to installed all of them. However, you should use eclipse since this tutorial will use Eclipse for the demonstration.

7-zip
It's the free zip tools that allow you to view, extract or create zip files. You will need it to view war files or extracting downloaded files. Here is the download link.

Firefox Web Developer Plugin
It's very useful to validate css, form fields and trace of javascripts output. You can download it from here.

PSPad
This is the powerful text editor supporting many popular programming languages and text file formats such as xml, xhtml, javascript and so on. Download it from here.

Eclipse
Finally, you can get Eclipse IDE for J2EE which comes along with web development plugin.

1. Go to eclipse.org.
2. Select the mirror and download eclipse-jee-europa-winter-win32.zip
3. Extract the file to the folder that you want to install.
4. Then you have to extract ICEfaces eclipse plugin, ICEfaces-1.7.2-SP1-Eclipse-3.4-plugins.zip, that is already downloaded to the same folder as eclipse-je.

OK! Now.. Set up is complated and we are ready to start!