My first webapp, Walkthrough pt1: Requirements

This is the first entry in a series of post that guide through the creation of a tomcat (tomcat-5.5) web application with the following features:

1. Database connectivity (mysql-5)
2. User authentication (a simple one, not JAAS stuff)
3. User-created database content
   
4. Universal foreign language support in forms, parameters and files (utf-8 encoding)
5. File creation/manipulation
   

I consider a java-6 based system, and will report which things differ with standard java-1.4 cases (usually the encoding stuff). There will be no reference to the development tools, since this walkthrough aims at full understanding of every potential change to the configuration of the involved software subsystems. I would suggest any linux flavour for this. My configuration:

• Linux Mint 4.0 (ubuntu-7.10 based)
  
• Sun Java 6u6 (from apt-get)
• Tomcat 5.5 (from apt-get)
• Mysql 5.1 (from apt-get)

The Walkthrough pt2 will hold important configuration parameters of the installed software