JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development [Paperback]

Wellington L. S. Da Silva (Author), Wellington Silva (Author), Wellington L.S. da Silva (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2002 | Series: Landmark

Of the several core Web development environments, including ASP, PHP, and ColdFusion, JSP enjoys the greatest robustness because it's based on the Java language. In addition, newly-introduced tag libraries will even further extend JSP's functionality by making code easy to reuse and maintain. As a result, web developers are increasingly likely to choose JSP as their Web application-programming environment. This book is a guide to the recently introduced Java Tag Extension API, illustrated by real-life case studies. A complete approach to JSP programming is provided, with a discussion of its shortcomings and how these can be addressed by employing tag libraries. It discusses modeling and designing applications based on these technologies, then provide a specific implementation (Jakarta STRUTS). This book goes well beyond other resources on JSP, which contain at most a single chapter on tag libraries. The explanation of tag library technology and examples of its implementation will help bring new capabilities to current JSP programmers. Code samples will be available for download from www.newriders.com.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This book is a guide to the recently introduced Java Tag Extension API, illustrated by real-life case studies. A fairly complete approach to JSP programming is provided, with a discussion of its shortcomings and how these can be addressed by employing tag libraries. It will discuss modeling and designing applications based on these technologies, then provide a specific implementation (Jakarta STRUTS).
This book goes well beyond other resources on JSP, which contain at most a single chapter on tag libraries. The explanation of tag library technology and examples of its implementation will help bring new capabilities to current JSP programmers

About the Author

Wellington L. S. da Silva has been working with servlet-based development since their introduction in 1997. He has been actively involved in many open source projects throughout the years. Since 1999, he has been a consultant to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization at Rome where he is developing a number of web applications. In addition, Wellington works actively with the TOMCAT Servlet Container and platform project. Has been also an active member of the Jakarta STRUTS Project and has developed the FBBuilder tool for STRUTS and the AAS application, discussed in the book, within that framework. Wellington has over 14 years of client-server application development experience in SQL, Delphi-Pascal and C/C++ for the Windows platform, and with popular databases such as DB2 and Oracle. He has collected prizes and nominations for his work in network development and administration in the late 80's and early 90's. The last 6 years have been dedicated to web collaborative applications development.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: New Riders Publishing; 1 edition (January 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735710953
• ISBN-13: 978-0735710955
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,691,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Thumbs down., October 22, 2002

By 

Carl T. Dreher (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development (Paperback)

This book really needed a good editor and a ghost writer who knows how to simply explain technical subject. The author probably knows the technical stuff but his explanations aren't at all useful. If you don't already have good background in the material, you'll not learn it here.

My biggest complaints are about the example code.
1. JSP, Struts and Tag libraries are, in the big picture, all about generating HTML. Despite that, NOWHERE in this 442 page book is a single screen shot showing output! There are examples that go on for three pages of coding but do not have a single page showing what the example produced.
2. The examples are cluttered with lots of extraneous code that detracts from the point of the example. In one case, most of the example code had to do with JNDI and not about the tag he was creating. I found that many times I had to wade through a page or two of Java code before I got to the few lines that were the point of the example.
3. The explantion of most examples is at the end, after pages of code, and usually quite short. The publisher should have set the explanation comments in bold and off to the right of the key areas.

Don't buy this book for the explanation of Struts, either. There are far better examples and tutorials on the Apache Struts web site.

Not recommended.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost the right Struts book, December 13, 2001

By 

Reid M. Pinchback - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development (Paperback)

This is basically a good book. It could have been a great book. The author made a good start; this book provides a fast way to pick up the raw basics of JSPs, tag libraries, and Struts. It also provides a solid background on the business and architectural issues that motivated the development of JSP and Struts.

The biggest problem with the book is that the editors didn't do their job. Normally I don't pick nits with language and spelling mistakes in a book, but there are so many of them in this book that they continually distract the reader. Yes, the author should be responsible for those issues, but the editor is supposed to be the final quality-control check on problems like this. I can't see how the editors read even a few percent of this book before sending it to the printers.

This is a better book to skim than to sit down and read, because you'll get tired of trying to untangle the grammar, fill in the missing words, and take out the extra words as you wade through it. There are several minor technical mistakes too, but most books have a few of those. As is often the risk with fast-moving technology, there is also some stale content in the description of the various Struts tag libraries.

As far as I know this is the only book that goes into any detail on Struts. If you need to learn about Struts, this is a reasonable book to learn from. I'm just glad that my employer payed for my copy. If I'd payed for it out of my own pocket I would probably have sent my copy back (...).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Could Have Been Better, March 31, 2002

By 

rattan mann (Oslo, Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development (Paperback)

I find it somewhat difficult to say that it is really a good book.I found three major shortcomings:

1) A lot of code is quoted from other sources without explanations.It is not uncommon to find 3 pages of code ending with three lines of explanations.
2) A lot of details are included in the text which rightly belong to an appendix.Such details merely distract the attention of the reader from the main arguments.
3) There is a lot of JSP code without a single illustration(screen-shot) as to how this code may render in a browser.The reader must get the picture himself.Again this detracts the attention from the main argument.

On a positive note,I could say that the author has included 3 chapters on the Struts framework,starting the discussion with a good explanation of how and why the MVC pattern has to be generalized from the restricted UI case to the more general web case,leading to MVC2.But this part of the book also suffers from the same shortcomings.

In conclusion, I would say,if more explanations are added,the main text is stripped off unnecessary appendix-type details,and
JSP code is accompanied by screen-shots, this could turn into a very good book.