ofbiz newbie

Hello ofbiz users,
I am a newbie wit a couple of questions:

1- Is the tutorial "A beginners Development Guide" still current?

The reason I am asking is that I have been trying for more than 3 hours
to get part 2 to work but I always get the error message:
/java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Could not find screen file with
name [component://practice/webapp//
///practice/widget/CommonScreens.xml]//./
When I remove the /webapp/ part from the path, I get:
/java.lang.RuntimeException: Error rendering included screen named
[CommonPracticeDecorator] at location
[component://practice/widget/CommonScreens.xml]:
java.io.FileNotFoundException:
/media/VERBATIMSSD/ofbiz/trunk/hot-deploy/practice/widget/CommonScreens.xml
(No such file or directory)/
The file is there. I have tried many different combinations with and
without the "webapp" part, but to no avail. I thought this thing was
going to be simple but it is a little bit frustrating. I have looked in
the example application and the main difference at this point is whether
or not /webapp/ should be there or not.

2- How do ofbiz experts actually develop their applications and what am
I doing wrong?

I spent close to 4 hours trying to fix what I believe is a trivial
thing, but 90% of that time was spent restarting the application even
though I am running in debug mode with the latest from svn. If I change
a single character in a single xml file, I restart the whole server. I
really want to like this software because of the amount of work I see
that people have put in but this is one of those times I wished I was a
php developer.
Thx for your help.