John,

Thanks for the very helpful article. I was able to work through the example in part 1 and will tacke part 2 shortly. I just wanted to add some comments to help other newbies like me who may not know some of the things you take for granted.

1) Install Ant following their instructions:

1-a) extract contents of downloaded zip file to say c:\ant
1-b) add ANT_HOME as a system variable pointing to c:\ant
1-c) add ";%ANT_HOME%\bin" to the end of the system PATH variable
NOTE: System variables are updated by selecting 
"My Computer"/properties - then click Advanced Tab -
- then click Environment Variables button

2) In reference to "After the MBean interface is coded," - there is nothing additional you have to do after Eclipse creates it. The BlogExampleServiceMBean.java file only needs to contain:

public interface BlogExampleServiceMBean extends ServiceMBean {}

 3)  In reference to "run the deploy target" - right-click on the build.xml file in the Eclipse Package Explorer and then click on "Run as" and select "1 Ant build".

Here is a link to an article on integrating Ant into the Eclipse IDE: 
    Integrating Ant with Eclipse, Part 1 
  

 4) To start the JBoss console on my system I had to leave off the ":8080/" port number and just use: http://localhost which may be a quirk of the JBoss setup that I am working with.

I hope this helps someone eventually as much as John's article has helped me,
DZ