Besides being a useful guide to APIs, the book looks at a variety of techniques for saving session state, as well as showing how servlets can work together to power Web sites. You will learn performance tips and ways to get servlets to work together (such as forwarding and redirection), plus the basics of database programming with JDBC to build content with "live" data. A later chapter examines what's next for servlets with the emerging Servlet 2.3 API standard. Importantly, the authors go over deploying and configuring Web applications by editing XML files, a must-have for successfully running servlets in real applications.

Since the first edition of this title, the choices for Java Web developers have grown much richer. Many of the new chapters in this edition look at options beyond servlets. Short sections on application frameworks such as Tea, WebMacro, the Element Construction Set (ECS), XMLC and JavaServer Pages (JSPs) let you explore what's out there for Java developers today with a survey of some current tools that can speed up creating new Web applications.

The text closes with reference sections on servlet APIs