Are you coming to the MN Splash tomorrow? A couple members of my team will be giving a comprehensive overview of how to do everything in Java that would probably answer all of your questions. The presentation contains just about all of the main parts of our code from last year, and would show you exactly how to get everything started, set up your subsystems, set up commands to act on those subsystems, and link all of that to your OI.
If you can't make it to Splash (it looks like you're a bit far north), contact us at
2177@therobettes.com, and our lead programmer can get you the presentation, and possibly set up a skype chat to walk through it at some point.