My First Work :) :)

Still because I am a first year student my exposure to different technologies is somewhat low.For the first year we are learning programming concepts with C++.
Anyway I am very new to java programming.For now I'm very much know the basics but beyond that I still learning it.
So Pearson :) ...As my first task I had to join a new team which they were creating new web applications to Pearson dashboard.So I was given some time for a POC (Proof of concept).My task was to check whether we can integrate Google Chart tool with our applications.I had to go through the Google JSAPI API,Google Visualization API and I had to create some sample applications of jsp and servlets in J2EE from Eclipse juno IDE.Also I had to convert the javaobjects to JSON strings using Jackson...
I was able to achieve my task successfully within the given time which I was very happy.I got some help from my collegues for that.
So as I'm new to J2EE I would like to mention some areas which I found interesting for all the beginners out there.Cheers!!
Apache Maven
So some users may say it's a build tool which used in preprocessing ,compilation,packaging ,testing and distribution.Some users might say it's a project management tool.Indeed! What I also like to call Maven,is a project management tool.Because it is a PM tools with all the  features in a build tool.In addition to building capabilities Maven has the option to run reports and generate websites also.And specially what is great about Maven is,it provides the facilities to communicate among members  of the working team.
Tomcat
It is an open source stand-alone web server which provides the official reference implementation of the JSP (Java Server Pages) and java Servlets technoogies.Simply it serves dynamic web content based on Java technology.In other words it is a cotntainer for servlets.First we have to create JSP code or servlets,create some web pages in HTML to reference them,Then what happens is,it compiles everything, deploy it to Tomcat (which encapsulates it in a container), and test it via a web browser.

Ant-It is a java based software (Mainly a build tool)

Cactus-It is a test framework for unit testing server side code

JSON It means Java Script Object Notation.It is a syntax uses for storing and exchanging text information much like XML.JSON is smaller than XML but faster and easier to understand.

{
"student": [
{ "firstName":"Amila" , "lastName":"Iddamalgoda" }, 
{ "firstName":"Malith" , "lastName":"Iddamalgoda" }, 
{ "firstName":"Siri" , "lastName":"Iddamalgoda" }
]
}
Uses to describe the data objects.It is a platform independent language.

JACKSON It is a high performance JSON processor java library.I used this for converting Java object to/from JSON.

Jackson contains 6 seperate .jars.For the conversion I only needed the "jackson-mapper-asl".Just add the following dependency to the pom.xml in maven project.

  <repositories>
 <repository>
  <id>codehaus</id>
  <url>http://repository.codehaus.org/org/codehaus</url>
 </repository>
  </repositories>
 
  <dependencies>
 <dependency>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-mapper-asl</artifactId>
  <version>1.8.5</version>
 </dependency>
  </dependencies>