So this week I have attempted to start development.  I have read through the online documentation, which, in typical Google fashion, is fairly complete and detailed. The Android Developer Guide includes step by step instructions for installation of the SDK, Eclipse Plugin, and samples to get you programming quickly.

Of course, nothing is perfect.  So here are a couple of issues with the tools.

• It appears that sometimes changed resources don’t get updated when the emulator is re-launched.  Even though I’ve set the flag to Wipe User Data.
• I can get one version of the Google Maps sample to run correctly but not another.  It seems that the Sample Tutorial on the Web site doesn’t work for 2.0 or 2.0.1 emulators on my machine, but the sample bundled with the toolkits do.  To be honest, it appears that the only difference is WHERE the MapView is instantiated, but I am still a noob at this, so I am probably mistaken

Is this going to be enough to cause me to give up?  Heck no.  Even though these two items are frustrating, the toolkit is still well put together and I expect to be building apps in no time.  My next posts will detail the building of an app.

My setup

First things first – here are the tools I’m using

• Eclipse Ganymede with GWT Plugin
• GWT 1.6
• JTDS 1.2.2

Steps

1.  Create jetty-web.xml file in war/WEB-INF/
2.  Copy the following into jetty-web.xml

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC “-//Mort Bay Consulting//DTD Configure//EN” “http://jetty.mortbay.org/configure.dtd”>
<Configure class=”org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext”>
<New id=”website” class=”org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.Resource”>
<Arg>java:comp/env/jdbc/dataSourceName</Arg>
<Arg>
<New class=”net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbcx.JtdsDataSource”>
<Set name=”DatabaseName”>(databaseName)</Set>
<Set name=”ServerName”>(serverName)</Set>
<Set name=”User”>(User)</Set>
<Set name=”Password”>(Password)</Set>
</New>
</Arg>
</New>
</Configure>

3.  Add Jetty Plus and Jetty Naming to your classpath

For this step, I created a new folder off the root of my GWT project called, “dependency”.  Please note that jetty-naming has a dependency on activation and mail.  So, the .jar files I have to import into my project are:

• jetty-plus-6.1.12.jar
• jetty-naming-6.1.12.jar
• activation-1.1.jar
• mail-1.4.jar

I want to deploy these applications to Tomcat, so I configured the launcher to include these on the classpath,  Run->Run Configurations…->Classpath->User Entries->Add JARS…

While configuring the laucher, add the following under Arguments->VM Arguments

-Djava.naming.factory.initial=org.mortbay.naming.InitialContextFactory

4.  In my code, I now get the connection with the following:

Context lContext = new InitialContext();

DataSource lDataSource = (DataSource) lContext.lookup(“java:comp/env/jdbc/dataSourceName”);

Connection connection = lDataSource.getConnection();

Alternate

If you want to use connection pooling or a different database, here is a link to the Jetty page that shows some sample configs: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/DataSource+Examples

The most informative BLOG entry I found: http://humblecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/gwt-16-using-jndi-datasource.html

It would not have been bad except that it was right in my face, so that little spark seemed a huge flame. I’m just glad that didn’t happen overnight, or I would Likely have more than an ember burn in my couch.