Hello,
Sounds like an interesting project, always good to learn new things in new environments. We got alot of tutorials on the DO community. You can use this tutorial to setup a Java web server for Ubuntu. If you need Java7 instead, use the following commands instead at "Step Four - Install Java Development Kit (Optional)" :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

It'll keep your java 7 installation up to date.

To automatically set up the Java 7 environment variables JAVA_HOME and PATH:

sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-set-default

Hope you will figure it out now, if you can't get it working put a reply here or you can add me on skype: cryptic-designs