Jython Webapp Tutorial

Sean McGrath
http://www.propylon.com
http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com
10 October 2004


This tutorial is aimed at Java Webapp developers interesting in investigating the benefits that dynamic typing in general and the jython programming language in particular, can bring to web application development.

This is not a tutorial on the Jython language itself. There are excellent resources available on the Web. Visit www.jython.org and www.python.org to start with if you are seeking language tutorial stuff.

The goal here is to build up, over the course of three or four tutorial chunks, a non-trivial Webapp featuring servlets, XML parsing, XPath data extraction and JMS messaging.

The following technologies will be used:

Not coincidentally, these are four technologies correspond to the 4 principle components you need to create Web Services according to my view of the world. As I see it, the use of dynamic processing paradigms on the server side, to manipulate XML messages flowing between URIs and back-end systems is what Web Services should be all about. YMMV.

Note: This tutorial was developed on Windows but it should be easily convertable to other operating systems.

Currently, the plan is to have 5 sections in the tutorial. The first part is available with the remaining parts to follow as time permits: