JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition (Paperback)

by Hans Bergsten (Author)
Key Phrases: standard tag library, tag library descriptor, validating user input, String No Optional, String Yes Optional, Email Address (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Hans Bergsten, a JSP expert group veteran and one of our most active contributors, has thoroughly and accurately captured the new features of JSP 2.0 and JSTL 1.1 in a way that is well-organized and easy to understand. With excellent, to-the-point examples, this book is a 'must have' for any serious JSP 2.0 developer." --Mark Roth, JSP 2.0 Specification Lead, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Hans Bergsten is the founder of Gefion Software, a company focused on Java services and products based on J2EE technologies. Hans has been an active participant in the working groups for both the servlet and JSP specifications since their inception and contributes to other related JCP specifications, such as JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) and JavaServer Faces (JSF), and, as one of the initial members of the Apache Jakarta Project Management Committee, helped develop the Apache Tomcat reference implementation for the servlet and JSP specifications.

Product Description
JavaServer Pages (JSP) has built a huge following since the release of JSP 1.0 in 1999, providing Enterprise Java developers with a flexible tool for development of dynamic web sites and web applications. While point releases over the years, along with the introduction of the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL), have incrementally improved the rough areas of the first version of the JSP specification, JSP 2.0 takes this technology to new heights.

JavaServer Pages, Third Edition, is completely revised and updated to cover the JSP 2.0 and JSTL 1.1 specifications. It includes detailed coverage of the Expression Language (EL) incorporated into JSP 2.0, the JSTL 1.1 tag libraries and the new function library, the new tag file format that enables custom tag library development without Java code, the simplified Java tag library API, improvements in the JSP XML syntax, and more. Further, it details setup of the Apache Tomcat server, JSP and JSTL syntax and features, error handling and debugging, authentication and personalization, database access, XML processing, and internationalization.

This book recognizes the different needs of the two groups of professionals who want to learn JSP: page authors interested in using JSP elements in web pages and programmers concerned with learning the JSP API and using JSP effectively as a part of an enterprise application. If you're in the first group, you learn from the practical web application examples in the second part of the book. If you re in the latter group, you appreciate the detailed coverage of advanced topics in the third part, such as integrating servlets and JavaBeans components with JSP using the popular Apache Struts MVC framework, and how to develop custom tag libraries using the JSP API, with realistic examples you can use as a springboard for your own libraries.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 664 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 3rd edition (December 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596005636
• ISBN-13: 978-0596005634
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #151,432 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointinly basic, January 8, 2005

By	navrins "navrins" (MA United States) - See all my reviews

Coverage is okay, but the book assumes so little knowledge that it is very frustrating for an experienced web developer who just wants to add JSP to his toolbox. It spends quite a while in the middle of chapters on such basic programming knowledge as using parentheses to change the order of mathermatical operations and using "!" as a logical negator. It also explains from scratch HTML concepts like relative and absolute links, and basic form elements.

If the book were better organized, these basic concepts might have been explained in introductory chapters which one could skip (if they were even included in the first place - it seems to me that anyone who needs these things explained isn't ready to be learning JSP, though I could be wrong). But since they're embedded in the middle of JSP discussion it is hard to just skip them - and I often find myself skimming over new material simply because I've gotten into the habit.

It's not a bad book, but it needs to be better targeted at an audience of a specific skill level. For an O'Reilly book it's very disappointing.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Better choices out there for learning JSP/Servlets, March 12, 2005

By	J. Wong "joohop" (Jackson Heights, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I bought this book hoping to learn enough of JSP/Servlets to create an e-commerce website.

My impression after reading this book is that the author tries very hard to please both beginners and intermediate developers. To this extent, he winds up pleasing no one.

Quite often he tells "advanced programmers" to jump ahead and read a later chapter. This didn't make the book flow very well. This book gives a lot of JSP code, but skimps on the code when it comes to Beans, which are critical elements to the examples. I assume the author expects the reader to download the Bean code from O'Reilly's website and decipher the code by themselves. Because of this incompleteness, I was not able to completely grasp the ideas behind the examples. It would've been better if the author included the Bean code along with the supporting JSP code. By not providing code for them, Beans are treated like a "black box" throughout this book.

The last gripe I have about this book is the author's inordinate amount of use of "..." in the code examples. Quite often in listing the codes, he would throw the three dots. Again, this renders the examples in the book almost useless to those trying to type in the code for themselves to learn.

A more thorough and coherent book for learning about JSP and Servlets would be "Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages" by Marty Hall and Larry Brown.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Horribly disorganized, July 20, 2005

By	M. C Colgan - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

O'Reilly falls down on its usual excellent editorial job and delivers an undisciplined unstructured mess that is useless as a reference. The JSTL examples are so incomplete as to be virtually worthless. As an experienced developer, I spent my 45 bucks expecting a useful reference and practical guide, instead getting a beginner's tour and some appendices of jstl syntax spec.