What's in the Book

In creating the recipes for this book, I tried to cover as many common and advanced web developer tasks as I could practically fit into one book. This amounts to about 230 different recipes. Each recipe shows how to implement a particular task using servlets, JSPs, and, in many cases, one or more supporting Java classes.

The recipes show how to:

• Authenticate web clients

• Interact with databases

• Send email

• Handle submitted data from a web form

• Read and set "cookies"

• Upload files from the client

• Integrate JavaScript with servlets and JSPs

• Embed multimedia files like digital movies and music in JSPs and servlets

• Handle web clients whose users speak different languages (internationalization)

• Log messages from servlets and JSPs

• Dynamically include chunks of content, as in traditional server-side include (SSI) code

• Interact with Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) from a JSP and servlet

• Use Amazon.com's and Google.com's Web Services APIs from a servlet or JSP

I have also included numerous technology-specific recipes, such as:

• Using "sessions" in your Java web applications (a concept that represents the tracking of a user's progress through a web site)

• Working with "filters"

• Using the open source ANT tool to build web applications

• Binding Java objects to a session or web application so they can be used as information or data containers

• Creating your own custom tags for JSPs

• Using the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL), which is a large set of prebuilt tags you can use in JSPs

In short, the book is designed to help guide Java web developers in their everyday tasks, and to provide quick solutions to typical web-related problems.

BEA WebLogic Recipes

Because Java web developers tend to work with both Tomcat and a proprietary application server, I've included a number of different recipes to show how to implement common tasks with BEA WebLogic. As a practical matter, I could not cover the several other application servers that are available, such as IBM's WebSphere, JBoss, Jetty, Oracle 9i application server, or commercial servlet engines such as New Atlanta ServletExec and Caucho Resin. But I wanted to include recipes covering "how the other half lives" in terms of using various vendor tools for managing everyday web-application tasks. Solutions involving the deployment or revision of web components and deployment descriptors using visual interfaces such as WebLogic's Administration Console or WebLogic Builder can be quite different from those used with Tomcat.

As a result, this book includes a collection of basic WebLogic-related recipes, such as deploying web applications on WebLogic, and using a servlet to access a WebLogic DataSource. Chapter 25 shows how a servlet can interact with an EJB installed on WebLogic.