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As much as I would like to dive into Tapestry right now, we must first talk about your development environment. The joy and the pain of Java development is the volume of choice available. There's just a bewildering number of JDKs, IDEs and other TLAs (Three Letter AcryonymsAcronyms) out there.
Let's talk about a stack of tools, all open source and freely available, that you'll need to setup. Likely you have some of these, or some version of these, already on your development machine.
JDK 1.5 or Newer
Tapestry 5 makes use of features of JDK 1.5. This includes Java Annotations, and a little bit of Java Generics. JDK 1.6 works fine too.
Eclipse Helios (3.6.1 or Newer)
Since we're emphasizing a free and open source stack, we'll concentrate on the best free IDE.
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There are plugins available for Eclipse, but we will not be using those here; instead, we'll use Maven to generate Eclipse control files for us.
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