Introduction and setup instructions

I have been working on a project in my spare time to learn new tools and technologies.  It is a Java rest server stack using Jersey with a MySQL Database.   It has a Flex client as an example of how to communicate between a server and client. While working on this project I have learned so much from Blogs, Forums, books and technical documents, that I felt I needed to give back to the community.  So I released all the code I wrote as open source and I am writing this blog to describe how and why I created each section.

You can download the code for the server stack and the Flex client at 

http://code.google.com/p/java-rest-platform/ 

I have given a large effort into following best practices and  design patterns, but as with everyone i am still learning. So if you see any areas we can improve this code please feel free to let me know. 

Now as a first step I will go though how to setup everything need to run the server stack. The instructions will be broken up into the next few blog posts.