Internet Cross Logo
Internet Cross your one stop web tutorial website
Your Ad Here
Search Internet Cross Shop:

JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

List Price: $44.95
Our Price: $6.00
Your Save:$ 38.95 ( 87% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Average Customer Rating: Average rating of 3.5/5Average rating of 3.5/5Average rating of 3.5/5Average rating of 3.5/5Average rating of 3.5/5

Buy it now at Amazon.com!

Back to previous page




JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.2762
EAN: 9780596005634
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596005636
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 664
Publication Date: 2003-12-01
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Related Items
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5
Summary: Beautifully written
Comment: This is an extremely well written and informative book. I have
lots of experience with servlets, so I don't know how the book
will appeal to page designers, but I had no problem reading and
enjoying the chapters oriented more toward them. I used to look
at JSP and see the same kind of maintenance nightmare that comes
with something like PHP when your project gets large. I have
been using WebMacro/Velocity but am now a convert to JSP since
it has matured. I love the author's philosophy of no scriptlets
in your JSPs. I own many programing books, but I believe this
is the best written I've seen.
Customer Rating: Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5
Summary: Perfect book for a structured reader.
Comment: If you are looking for a quick cookbook this should not be your choice. If you want to learn JSP in depth, buy it right now. Hans guides you from the basics to comprehensive details of JSP technology in a very structured way.

In any case, (from my point of view) JSP is not the whole jigsaw for building web applications, it's just a piece of it. So don't expect to be able to build real web applications if you just have read this book. At least, consider reading also Java, Struts/MVC and SQL.
Customer Rating: Average rating of 3/5Average rating of 3/5Average rating of 3/5Average rating of 3/5Average rating of 3/5
Summary: Good, but not great, user guide for JSP
Comment: Perhaps this is as good a user guide as is possible for JSP, which is a good, but not great techology.

JSP integrates between web markup user interfaces (usually HTML) and back-end java technology (usually servlets), and best practices have most of the interesting work done in these technologies, not in JSP. JSP's flaws come from too many spurious features that lead the unsuspecting user far away from best practices.

JSP's strengths as a template technology for web view markup come in its 2.0 version with its addition of programmatic logic to markup (JSTL for logical branches and loops, and tags for subroutines) which allow for development of markup without repeated code. This is a great benefit of JSP, and this book does a fairly good job of explaining it for JSTL/logic, but talks around it with confusing examples for tags/subroutines. To this book's credit, it is the only decent reference I have found for JSP 2.0 tag library development.

Best practices with JSP as an integration technology involve what is called "Model 2 MVC" where the JSP page is strictly used only as a template for markup (the "view" which is the "V" from "MVC"), a JavaBean is used for the M-"model" and a single servlet is used for the C-"controller". This concept is mentioned in this book, but its up to you to figure out how to implement it, and the book is full of examples that show off unrealistic uses of JSP's spurious features and are anything but best practices. At some point in using JSP's and servlets, you are going to have to go head-to-head (actually, head-to-confusing-XML) with a real deployment descriptor, and this book will give you little help as to why it doesn't work.

Until someone writes a truly useful reference for JSP and servlets, you will have to follow the time-honored tradition of finding an example that works and cut-and-pasting it into your web application. Poring over this book will help some, as will poring over Craig McClanahan's online doc that comes with Tomcat. The best book I've found so far for explaining best practice design with JSP is Rod Johnson's "expert one-on-one J2EE Design and Development" (read the chapters on web-tier MVC design and views in the web tier) though it's description of JSP is somewhat dated, and it won't help you out with implementation details.
Customer Rating: Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5
Summary: Horribly disorganized
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating: Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5
Summary: I wish I'd bought a different book
Comment: There is some really good information in this book. The problem is, you have to wade through a mess to find it. The author is constantly referencing chapters later in the book, suggesting that the reader look ahead for information on the subject currently being talked about. Much of the information in later chapters should have been included earlier on. Besides the annoyance of having to read ahead to keep up with the current subject, the author goes back on himself constantly. Examples are shown as a functional way to do things, and then later on, I found myself being told not to follow the methods explained previously because they arent an efficient way to work. On top of this, the language of the book seems overcomplicated. Simple concepts are explained in a long drawn out fashion left me wondering where I had lost my way.

I am picking things up that I wouldn't have figured out without the book, but I'm quite convinced that another book would have had me writing applications already.
  
Editorial Reviews:
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 the development of dynamic web sites and web applications. While new 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'll learn from the practical web application examples in the second part of the book. If you're in the latter group, you'll appreciate the detailed coverage of advanced topics in the third part, such as how to integrate servlets and JavaBeans components with JSP using the popular ApacheStruts MVC framework, and how to develop custom tag libraries using the JSP API, with realistic examples that you can use as a springboard for your own libraries.

"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.
Buy it now at Amazon.com!