JavaServer Pages (JSP) are designed for the rapid development of Web pages that display dynamic content, and that are platform independent. With its roots in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and in Java, JSP allows individuals with even modest backgrounds in those areas to master its syntax and semantics rapidly. Nonetheless, a book such as this one, especially since it addresses JSP 2, a major revision of JSP, is crucial for becoming adept quickly.
The book is divided into four parts: introductory explanatory material, details of JSP 2, advanced topics, and appendices. The text opens with a careful explanation of how to locate and install the necessary software to execute JSP 2. It then devotes a chapter to HTML that succinctly presents its essential features, so that even someone not familiar with HTML will be able to apply it, and profit from the rest of the book. The reader is walked through the creation of an HTML page, and introduced to cascading style sheets (CSS) and attributes.
Chapters 3 through 7 make up the heart of the book. Chapter 3 introduces JSP, and covers scriplets, tags, and the expression language, a new feature in JSP 2 that allows users to incorporate the results of expression in Web pages. After this short chapter, the book moves on to a substantial chapter on working with data. Recognizing that many readers do not have a strong background in databases, the authors devote considerable space to the relational database model, and to structured query language (SQL). Their explanations, and definitions of database concepts, have a clarity that extends the usefulness of this chapter beyond that of JSP. As with the rest of the book, the reader learns through engagement with specific tasks, which are implemented in this chapter using MySQL.
Chapter 5 discusses control structures and arrays. For those without experience in programming, this chapter provides excellent coverage of conditional, iterative, and branching statements; single and multi-dimensional arrays; and logical operators. For the more experienced, the chapter places those concepts within the domain of JSP.
Chapter 6, “Reusing Code,” begins with a discussion of the software development life cycle, and the need for a policy regarding code maintenance. It details two prominent JSP mechanisms for reusing code: includes and custom tags. The chapter then moves on to a discussion of the Java programming language (JPL), with an emphasis on JavaBeans. This section can be daunting for those without some expertise in object-oriented languages, even though the discussion of objects and classes is well done. Although both parts of the chapter are connected by the concept of software reuse, this section could stand alone as a chapter.
Chapter 7 addresses the manipulation of date and time data. It discusses the data class, the calendar class, and formatting dates and times. This chapter can be readily skipped by those without a specific interest in the intricacies of dates and times.
The final three chapters delve into advanced topics that evolve logically from the central section on JSP. The discussion of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) builds on the earlier discussion of HTML, and introduces the reader to the structure of XML, delivering XML documents via JSP, tags, and transformations. The last two chapters discuss the inner workings of JSP, and its architecture.
The book concludes with useful appendices covering JSP syntax, JSP implicit objects, XML configuration files, and a guide to obtaining more information.
The subtitle of this book, , commits to what might seem to be an unachievable goal: enabling a novice in JSP to become a professional. But the book delivers. Novices can quickly become facile in JSP, and those familiar with server-side technology can gain a strong understanding of JSP. Although the focus of the book is on JSP, its treatment of such matters as database concepts and elementary programming techniques make it useful to nonprogrammers who want an introduction to the field, and who want to have some mastery of Web technology.
