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This section of the tutorial is dedicated to the impatient.  Consequently, I won't bore you with the design philosophy. Read the following sections to get that.

One of the obstacles that needs to be overcome is your choice of a development environment. I know a lot of people use an IDE and feel a little exposed or unconfident at the command line. Most folks tend to think of their "development machine" as a single entity on the network, and that they will only go outside of their development machine when it comes time to test or deploy the finished application.

Where it's possible, try to defeat these limitations. Deliberately set up a web server and servlet engine on a different machine, and use the network to access it. The operational architecture that I like to use is to have my workstation (where my keyboard, mouse, and monitor are) be the host for the editor, compiler, and web browser - and to have a Linux server somewhere else on the network to host the web server, servlet engine, and JVM. Where possible, I also like to use a third machine to host the RDBMS so that I can be sure that my JDBC servlets are using the network.

In spite of my preferences, I know that the reality is that you may only have access to your single development workstation and that you have to will work inside of that box. This tutorial doesn't assume that you have (or need) a RDBMS, but many (most?) real-world applications do. What I ask is that you at least THINK outside of the confines of that operational architecture - this effort will pay you back many times over when it comes time to deploy and maintain.

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