My guess is that you were crashing because you were using the copy of joal that came with the lesson. There is a bug in this that was fixed in later versions of joal. But, the api also changed, making the tutorial out of date.
To get the tutorial to work as-is, you need to place the joal.dll and joal.jar into your lib/ext directory. Then you *MUST* remove all instances of those libraries from your classpath. It should work then.
Migrating to the new API is pretty easy. Mithel started some updated tutorials at
http://www.starfireresearch.com/services/java/docs/joal.html. Grab the latest version of joal and try that.