I've been trying to wet my feet in the web-app development pool as of late. That being said, my knowledge/proficiency in programming on the whole isn't extensive. I've been studying the Java language for a (short) while, and I'm coming along. I'd probably have come a lot further if I had more spare time.

Anyway, a project I've been working on lately reached a point where the next step was to implement some sort of communication between two remote client instances through a server (it's a chess game -- a JApplet on a web page, I'm trying to enable two people to play against eachother through a web site). This led me to research Servlets, JSP, Apache Tomcat, and even SQL, trying to figure out just how exactly I can (and should) go about doing this. Unfortunantly, I haven't made much progress in this new phase of learning and development, but that's mostly because I've been working so much and haven't had a lot of time.

This all is really beside the point here, but I'm building up to it. See, when I started studying Java, everything was gravy because I had the JRE, the JDK, and I even threw in the J2EE SDK for good measure. It wasn't hard to keep track of what I was working with, and I started to get a feel for the territory. I thought "well hell, if it's going to be this easy, I'm in like Flint!" and set off on my new endeavor. Then my world was thrown into chaos by what I call Bundle Anarchy. Let me explain:

Someone advised me that Servlets/JSP would be the best way for me to go about my task, so I started googlin'. I found some good info, but every article or tutorial I read provided me only a few tasty morsels of knowledge; everything else was about these other technology bundles that go hand in hand with Servlets/JSP, like JSF, JSTL, JTA, EJB, Persistance API, Struts, AJAX, even PHP and SQL. I couldn't keep up. I started trying to download the bundles of whatever I thought (or was told) would meet my needs based on what I'm trying to accomplish.

I ended up worse than I started, really, because now I've got less disk space and nothing to show for it. I downloaded a few API bundles from Sun's Java site, then realized I'd need server software, so I downloaded Apache Tomcat and the Java SAS -- both of which were a pain in the ass to set up and integrate. Sun's got their bundles all screwed up, and I had to install and reinstall a few different things more than once to get the bundles/versions to... agree with eachother. And don't get me started on Sun's versioning practices.

Anyway, it's late and I've got to get some sleep. I just wanted to rant a little bit before I hit the sack.

Feel free to post your similar experiences with Bundle or Version Anarchy. I hope it's not just silly ole' me having these problems because I'm an incompetent ninny

Just wondering, since your chess game is a web app, it won't be too hard to connect it to the existing server for your purpose?

For me, any programming language is the same. The main thing is the concept. Normally for something new, i'll pick a language that i'm proficient in, then do a simple setup to prove the concept. Only after that i'll go for the real thing.

JSP is a very good and secure programming language. Anything has it's pro and cons. So is JSP.

Another thing you should take note is that there far less hosting server that support JSP comparing to PHP and ASP.