Ok so a lot of reading the opengl superbible later and i've finally got my first lwjgl triangle on the screen. Hardly Crysis 3 but here's what i did so that's its documented for future opengl newbies.
So first off, I swapped the lwjgl.jar for lwjgl-debug.jar. This threw up an exception in the Vertex buffer init code. The main problem was here :
glBufferData(positionBufferObject, fb, GL_STATIC_DRAW);
//should be
glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, fb, GL_STATIC_DRAW);
So i wasn't actually putting data into the array buffer properly...oops.
The second main bit was the fact that i didn't create and initialise a Vertex Array Object, so i added :
// Create the Vao
vao = glGenVertexArrays();
glBindVertexArray(vao);
To create one. Without this, the superbible informs me, all VBO-specific calls will fail and nothing will get drawn.
So i've checked the code into Github, take a look and i hope you find it useful.
Onward with OpenGL 3.x !
M