THIS IS A TEST INSTANCE. ALL YOUR CHANGES WILL BE LOST!!!!
As much as we would like to dive into Tapestry right now, we must first talk about setting up 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 Acronyms) 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 Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.5. This includes Java annotations, and a little bit of Java generics. JDK 1.6 and JDK 1.7 work fine too.
Eclipse IDE
For this tutorial we'll assume you're using Eclipse as your Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Eclipse is a popular IDE, but feel free to adapt these instructions to IntelliJ, NetBeans, or any other.
Eclipse comes in various flavors, and includes a reasonable XML editor built-in. It can be downloaded from the eclipse.org web site. We recommend the latest version of Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (but anything from version 3.7 onward should work fine).
Jetty
Jetty is an open source web servlet and servlet container available from the Eclipse Foundation. Jetty is designed for high performance and easy embedding in other software.
RunJettyRun Eclipse Plugin
RunJettyRun is a very simple Eclipse plugin that bundles a version of Jetty (Jetty 6 at this writing) so that you can create Eclipse launches that start Jetty to execute your web application.
You can install RunJettyRun using Eclipse's Install New Software... menu item; the update URL is http://run-jetty-run.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/updatesite.
This tutorial was written with RunJettyRun version 1.3.1.
Apache Maven 3
Maven is a comprehensive software build tool with the ability to automatically download project dependencies (such as the Tapestry JAR files, and the JAR files that Tapestry itself depends on) from one of several central repositories.
Maven is not essential for using Tapestry, but is especially helpful when performing the initial set-up of a Tapestry application.
Eclipse comes with its own Maven plugin, M2Eclipse (also known as m2e) that you are free to use if you're already familiar with it. However, for this tutorial we'll use the Maven command line ("mvn"). The command-line version of Maven is available from http://maven.apache.org/download.html. Go ahead and download and install it.
Tapestry
You should not have to download this directly; as we'll see, Maven should take care of downloading Tapestry, and its dependencies, as needed.