I've been doing web development with PHP for a few years now, and lately I've been feeling more and more frustrated with the language.  This is largely because my designs of late have become more and more object-oriented and broken into components, and I'm working with PHP 4.  I know that PHP 5 offers more in this area, but since they seem to very closely follow Java's object model, I'm thinking I should look into the "real thing".  Not to mention the availability of PHP 5 on general web hosts is still fairly poor, some humiliating compatibility gaffes with the 5.1.0 release, the lack of namespaces and the jumble of "core" functions...

But I haven't been able to find a good starting point.  I downloaded Sun's J2EE Tutorial, and have Apache Tomcat installed on a testing machine, but the so-called tutorial is overwhelming and I'm not quite sure what to do.  Does anyone here know of good resources for familiarizing yourself with the platform?

Thanks.

Not really directly related, but Java doesn't use namespaces either...

I'd suggest taking a look at Moodle (ugh, so ugly).  It's an opensource servlet (if I'm thinking of the right thing...) for school courses, but it should be pretty easy to see what's going on.

[quote author=rabbit link=topic=13508.msg137566#msg137566 date=1134530130]
Not really directly related, but Java doesn't use namespaces either...[/quote]No, but it has a package system.

[quote author=rabbit link=topic=13508.msg137566#msg137566 date=1134530130]I'd suggest taking a look at Moodle (ugh, so ugly).  It's an opensource servlet (if I'm thinking of the right thing...) for school courses, but it should be pretty easy to see what's going on.
[/quote][quote author=moodle.org]Moodle is primarily developed in Linux using Apache, MySQL and [u]PHP[/u].[/quote](emphasis mine)

Hm...my teacher told me it was its own program...o well.  Sorry about that.

I haven't posted in a very long time  ;D

Anyway, the Servlet and JSP part of Java isn't nearly as developed as it should be.  I worked with Servlets and JSP and have even made a 100% binary (no BNLS whatsoever) bot in Servlets.  Ironically enough, the hashing, decoding etc was based loosely off your code shadypalm88 (bncsutil).

The project was called ServlerBot, it was 100% opensource.  Right now, the server which hosted the servlet and the source (myjavaserver.com) removed it when I finished and ended the project.  Needless to say, I think I did some fairly interesting stuff with B.net in servlets...

As far as tutorials go, I agree, there isn't really much that's helpful.  For me it was just more of a trial and error process when working with servlets.  I'll send you some contact info so I can walk you through this more easily in realtime.

I'm a bit lazy right now and don't care to remake a distributable package.  There was one floating around in the past.

If you want more info, do a forum search of 'ServlerBot'. 

I haven't worked with apache tomcat though.  My servlet container was hosted on myjavaserver.com which made it unecessary.  But I do have an idea of how the structure of servlets work on the tomcat server.