What's a CABOOSE

CABOOSE is a daily weblog and an exploratory tutorial about the process of creating an open source project. Hopefully, we can learn much as a team along the way, and you, as an individual, can learn from the successes and failures which occur.

A CABOOSE can be created in any number of language which support the dynamic invocation of methods, functions, procedures, modules, or subroutines. It is highly applicable in the web-space, but can be useful in the areas of graphical user interfaces, report generators, and anywhere one might use a layered Model-II Model-View-Controller architecture when creating a software system.

Before one can fully appreciate this weblog, he should have an understanding of the JAVA programming language. If you are comfortable with using the most common keywords in the language, creating and invoking methods, extending an object, and access modifiers you should be fine. These are the concepts that many students learn in a modern freshman course in computer science as a core requirement or elective for a bachelors degree in computing. Also, you should become comfortable with using the reference materials available at Oracle for JAVA 6, 7, or 8. And, I hear that 9 is on the way. One can find the references for the latest JAVA 8 Standard Edition (JSE) at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/. We will also be using the JAVA Enterprise Edition (JEE). You will find the class reference for the JAVA 7 Enterprise Edition at http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/7/api/.

Seeing that there are over 4000 classes with numerous methods found in these references, do not expect that you can memorize them all. Simply be comfortable with using them the way one would use a dictionary.  Look-up terms when you come across one you do not understand or when you are looking for a particular term usage that you must use but cannot recollect.

Also, as a prerequisite become familiar with basic software engineering terms, especially those surrounding software architecture and life-cycle processes. If you do not know all of these things yet, but are interested in learning, this weblog is also for you. If you be interested in posting any questions visit the project page at https://java.net/projects/caboose and join the mailing list or post a question in the forum. They will be answered as resources become available. Also, if you are interested in finding out exactly what a CABOOSE is read the WIKI at the project pages.