I spent most of my free time in the past week developing the dmartin.org website from the ground up. In my commitment to leaving behind all things proprietary and expensive (ie. Microsoft) I scrapped ASP, threw out IIS, loaded up a free J2EE server (JBoss), threw in blojsom, and wrote some of my own code. And now, you can see what I have as a result.

Admittedly, I'm having plenty of difficulty transitioning from ASP to J2EE. I feel like such a n00b. I've had J2EE training, but it wasn't very good. One glaring conclusion I've made:

knowing Java <> knowing J2EE

I still can't figure out how to share resources between webapps. For instance, I'm including a header.jsp at the top of each page, and a footer.jsp at the bottom of each page, using <jsp:include>. This produces a consistent look & feel. It works, but I have to place those two files in every webapp. Every time I change them, I have to duplicate them to each webapp. There must be a way to produce a consistent look & feel across apps, without duplicating code. If you know, please let me know.

I spent much of the time perfecting the style sheet. Those tabs up top are pure CSS and extremely hard to get just right. They are based on some work I did with another guy for Popfile. They are easy to get working correctly in Mozilla, but a pain in Internet Explorer. To make the active tab bleed over in Internet Explorer, you simply must (sadly) use relative positioning. But, the results are pretty spectacular, and all without any JavaScript.