Amazon.co.uk Review
This book explains the inner and outer workings of Java Enterprise Edition's Java Serverside Pages (JSP) as it relates to delivering dynamic Web content. Built on Java Servlets JSP enables Java programmers to produce dynamic Web pages in a manner similar to Microsoft's ASP. JSP has advantages over ASP. For example, it needs to be interpreted only once and runs on server platforms other than Windows.
Professional JSP is a big, dense and full of painstakingly precise technical detail with occasional short illustrative stories. For example; the frog in the well. The eponymous frog is the Java VM. The well is the hardware and OS supporting it. In the story the VM is convinced it has plenty of spare resources but, of course, it can't 'see' the OS on which it runs and thus doesn't realise the support OS has none. The result is a stalled JVM with no problems or errors reported.
No previous knowledge of Java is assumed, though some experience of server programming would help. JSP developers need to understand databases, server administration, HTML and any other technologies with which the servlets interact. In practice, some knowledge of Java is also useful as JSP builds extensively on other Java technologies, JNDI for directory access is one. The case studies demonstrate this well. The weather report example requires working with XLST and WML (for WAP) among other, non-Java, languages.
Considering all this, the section on debugging shows welcome realism, "For a number of different reasons debugging JSP isn't easy". Too right. The combination of new and changing JSP specifications with mutliple languages and technologies makes it hellish. Still, if you persevere with Professional JSP at least you'll be in with a chance. --Steve Patient
Book Description
Professional JavaServer Pages covers a wide variety of areas including design and architecture, JSPs and their relation to J2EE (Servlets, EJBs, JDBC etc) as well as extensive coverage of the tag extension mechanism that allows you to customize the tags you use in your pages to the data you're presenting.
Readers are given an introduction to JSP, explaining how they relate to servlets, showing the tags, and creating beans to encapsulate business logic, to keep web page design simple. Further chapters cover database access with JDBC and connection pooling, JSP debugging, and web application architecture using JSP and servlets.
After considering security issues in JSP web applications, the book concludes with seven real-world case studies including using JSP, XML and XSLT to target content at WAP and HTML browsers, e-commerce, streaming using JMF, and porting an existing ASP-based application to JSP. Appendices give programming refreshers on installing the Tomcat JSP/Servlet engine, detailed references to JSP, the Servlet API, and HTTP, and finally JSP for ASP programmers.
This book is for both professional Java developers, who want to use JSP as the front-end of their J2EE web applications, and web designers, who want to see how JSP separates presentation from dynamic content generation. Although no knowledge of Java is assumed, reference will be made to a quick start Java tutorial and to other materials for some topics. Knowledge of HTML and some programming experience is required.
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