Friday's Nerd Day went pretty well. Steve started the day knowing Java itself, but nothing else, and by the end of play we'd covered Ant (which we used to do all our building and deploying), Tomcat, Eclipse, Servlets, JSPs and JSTL, Postgres and JDBC, and we'd written code to display the contents of a database table on a web page. Not in a lot of detail, true, but still, that's a lot of ground for one day. Steve seems pleased, anyway.

Mark had touched most of this before, but not for a good while, so I hope it was valuable to him too.

Loads more to cover, though - I'd like to expand on what I've already covered, and put a bit more meat on the bones, and there's still Spring and Hibernate to look at. So, we'll be doing another day or two before too long. Still, both my victims test subjects pupils feel up to coming along to the next London Java meetup.

Plenty of things went wrong, mainly due to my general incompetance and lack of planning. In a funny kind of way, though, this was a good thing - it gave us a change to diagnois and fix the problems. Knowing where the logs are is often half the battle.