"So you want to be a web developer?
Then read now  what I say
Just get yourself a laptop
Then take some time
and learn how to play
And with your opensource apps
And your googling skills
It's gonna be all right"

Join me in my adventure in (re)-acquainting myself with down and dirty application development in the new age of web 2.0 (3.0).  I've myspaced, facebooked, flickr'ed,  youtubed, smugmug'ed and now I want to create an application that will put all these together and more to serve a specific type of user and community. 

After years and years of hands-on development of server-side applications in C, C++ and Java, learning to do it all from gathering requirements from customers, to design, to deployment, testing, acceptance phase, performance tuning, scalability, maintenance work I made the inevitable move into management which brought less and less hands on work while keeping up with the technology by reading but  now that's all about to change ... well part time at least.   While discussing my idea with  colleagues,  the question of 'how does one go about  catching up  on the learning of all these  new technologies for all the developers out there?' and the followup question 'does Sun provide the needed technologies and products either directly or through partners for me to be able to develop and deploy my application?'.

Well the answer to the first question is simply by doing and I postulate that yes to the second question. So  the challenge that was given to me is  to show - warts and all - how a 'web' applications can be developed and deployed using Sun technologies and products, from start to finish. So with the collaboration of my some colleagues, we will take existing and representative  opensource applications, build and deploy them following certain rules:

1. Use NetBeans and/or Sun Studio as development environment
2. Deploy to OpenSolaris and include SAMP stack
3. Do not utilize internal communication channels to try and resolve issues. Use externally available information.
   

Simple really. Keep the process transparent and share, share, share.