PREREQUISITES : You know how to install a web-app in your servlet container (and you have one, don't you ? tomcat, resin, jetty, weblogic, websphere....). You know how to create a database in your DBMS, you've got the appropriate jdbc driver, and you know the user/password/url combination to get access to the bookstore database INSTALLATION : 1. copy the 'bookstore' directory to your webapps directory and configure your servlets container ; don't forget to set up the web-app log (specific to your container), it might be usefull 2. copy necessary libs to the /WEB-INF/lib directory (/velosurf-x.y.jar, along with those provided in the /lib/ directory should be ok, but don't forget the libraries of your JDBC driver) 3. create the 'bookstore' database or schema using your favourite DBMS and the provided bookstore.sql. You may have to adapt a little bit the file so that it fits with your dmbs rules (just try and catch SQL errors...). 4. edit the first line of /WEB-INF/velosurf.xml, don't forget to add schema="bookstore" if 'bookstore' is a schema. 5. check it works by pointing your browser to http://your_server/bookstore and by browsing a bit. If yes, shout "YEEEEEEEEEEES !", else crawl the logs, debug your config, and retry... REMARKS : As you may notice, the IDs of new objects are randomly choosen - it's because this method is database independant. It is somewhat redundant with the use of IDs obfuscation, and not recommended in a real app, but this is a sample !