So I finally got around to having enough time to set up a Java-based DXA connecting to a Content Service in the Amazon cloud.
It was a fun adventure, to say the least, and most of it is due to my rustiness in Java. I have tried with both Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea, and definitely IntelliJ made it a lot simpler by detecting project dependencies and installing them for me – which actually made it harder to get Eclipse to work, as I hadn’t noticed what it had done.
Anyway – below are the steps I followed to get a local instance of DXA running within Eclipse. As with the .NET install, you need to make sure you have a proper firewall configuration allowing communication between your machine and the CIS, as well as having the right mappings set in Topology Manager (I used the default of “localhost:8080″ for this). I will not cover those steps in this post.