MEETINGS

DJUG LINKS

WIKI QUICK LINKS

Book Reviews

This book review was submitted by a DenverJUG member as part of the Book Review Program.

BOOK DETAILS

REVIEWER

Jonathan White

REVIEW

JSP and servlets are Java's technology for developing enterprise web applications. Like CGI and other webserver technologies, servlets/JSP allow developers to handle client requests and provide content back to the clients. While servlets/JSP can be used independently, the strength of servlets/JSP is in leveraging other java technologies such as JDBC and EJBs. The Servlets/JSP specification has grown steadily more complex and powerful since it inception. The book "Java Servlet & JSP Cookbook" by Bruce Perry (O'Reilly) aims at unravelling some of the complexity by providing practical examples of the servlet/JSP specification in action. He divides his examples into 3 sections; A statement of the problem, a short summary of the solution, a discussion of the solution with code. Additionally he also provides references to other examples in the book that are related.

The book is divided into 27 chapters, with examples covering topics such as servlet container configuration, ant integration, writing jsp code, JSTL, database access, and a host of other topics. This book is not an introduction to servlets; however developers new to specification will find this book extremely useful in concert with another Servlet/JSP book or the Sun provided tutorials-- season pros will also find this book helpful.

The first 5 chapters deal mainly with administrative issues such creating WAR files, deployment , precompiling JSP and Ant integration. The book begins with examples for writing a servlet and JSP, interacting with request parameters; followed by an example of packaging it into a WAR file. Following this are examples of how to deploy servlets to a servlet container and several examples of pre-compiling JSP-- there are Tomcat and WebLogic specific examples.

The rest of the book focuses on using and developing JSP and servlets. The examples are geared toward the most recent Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 specification. Topics include JSTL, Filters, Tag libraries, Sessions, Beans, JDBC, JNDI, and a myriad other examples.

I found the examples to be thorough and useful. There are no glaring omissions from this book. My only grip is that there are no inline EL syntax examples-- which are highly useful and cleaner when including JSTL variables in code and html tags. As stated this book is an excellent companion to the Sun servlet documentation or other servlet book. I think that developers of all levels will find this book useful in deciphering the servlet specification and finding practical uses for the servlet specification.