We love baseball in my home, and my three boys play in our local Little League. I usually welcome the opportunity to help out with the league since I get to spend some extra time with the kids and perform community service too.

Little Leagues always need volunteers, and our league pinned me as the new "Information Officer." That means webmaster since my primary focus will be to organize our web presence and keep team schedules, news, and events updated. The current site is a mix of LAMP goodness: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. That's great, but we have a few concerns and problems with the existing setup:

1. Our league wants to make the existing site more flexible and usable.
2. We want to bring the site "in-house" to be able to manage the site's look, design, and features directly.
3. The current website is hosted and run by someone outside our league, and although I can add specific types of content, I can't change the navigation, add pages, or change the design of the site.
4. I really want to learn more about Java EE, JavaServer Faces (JSF), and Java DB!

When I think about it, I realize that I'm going to bring down a reasonably good site, and that's scary. I want to replace it with Glassfish (maybe Tomcat), Java DB, and a mix of JSF, JSP, and other Java technologies. Although it's not completely necessary, I'm going to do this for the learning experience and for the opportunity to share the lessons learned.

I hope you'll check back here over the next few months as I build my community's Little League baseball site from the ground up using all Java technologies. I don't know exactly what to expect, and failure is a definite possibility. It's a big experiment, and like many of the experiments I do, I like to share the pain and the experience with others. I know I'm going to learn a lot from it, and I hope you will too!