Here’s what I’ve been up to:

1. Setup a development/source control/integration on the excellent Ubuntu Server Edition. Gotta hand it to these Debian distros, they’re really easy to use. Ubuntu’s community also makes it easy to solve problems or to get answer the many “How do I… ” questions for Linux n00bs like me.
2. Hook it up to DynDNS.org so that it’s accessible online (the server’s a VMWare virtual machine running in a desktop in my house). The Netgear wifi router has a support for DynDNS which allows it to automatically update whatever dynamic IP the server is currently using. Coupled that with port forwarding, I managed to host a cheap Tomcat server at home.
3. Crash course in setting up AppFuse, and in the process learned how to use m2eclipse to quickly build Maven projects in Eclipse. This plugin makes Maven easy to use by allowing searches for Maven archtypes, dependencies and plugins. Highly recommended!
4. Crash course in Spring Security (previously known as Acegi Security). I’m still cracking my head on this, but it seems too good to pass up.
5. Getting an integration server running by using Hudson. Hudson has support for CVS and Maven projects; it has the ability to checkout source codes from CVS and then run Maven with the project’s POM file to allow continuous build. I’ve yet to automate the deployment to Tomcat (using a simple bash script to copy to Tomcat’s webapps dir for now) and the automated build every CVS commit, but I’m happy so far.

The busy week is far from over though. All this is a small part of a larger project work I’m working on.