How This Book Is Organized

xxiii

A word of caution, however. Nobody becomes a great developer just by

reading. You have to write some real code, too. The more, the better. In each

chapter, I suggest that you start by making a simple program or a small varia 

tion of one of the examples given, then strike off on your own with a more sig 

nificant project. Skim the sections you don't plan on using right away, then

come back when you are ready to try them out. 

If you do this, you should quickly develop the confidence to handle the

real world problems that brought you here in the first place. You should be

able to decide where servlets apply well, where JSP is better, and where a com 

bination is best. You should not only know how to generate HTML content, but

you should also understand building other media types like GIF images or

Excel spreadsheets. You should understand HTTP 1.1 well enough to use its

capabilities to enhance the effectiveness of your pages. You should have no

qualms about developing Web interfaces to your corporate databases, using

either HTML forms or applets as front ends. You should be able to spin off

complex behaviors into JavaBeans components or custom JSP tag libraries,

then decide when to use these components directly and when to start requests

with servlets that set things up for separate presentation pages. You should have

fun along the way. You should get a raise. 

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into three parts: Servlets, JavaServer Pages, and Sup 

porting Technologies.

Part I: Servlets

Part I covers servlet development with the 2.1 and 2.2 specifications. 

Although version 2.2 (along with JSP 1.1) is mandated by the Java 2 

Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), many commercial products are 

still at the earlier releases, so it is important to understand the differ 

ences. Also, although servlet code is portable across a huge variety of 

servers and operating systems, server setup and configuration details 

are not standardized. So, I include specific details for Apache Tomcat, 

Sun's JavaServer Web Development Kit (JSWDK), and the Java Web 

Server. Servlet topics include:

When and why you would use servlets

Obtaining and configuring the servlet and JSP software