If you want to learn how to make great Indian food, you buy a recipe book by a great Indian chef and follow his or her directions. You’re not just buying any old solution. You’re buying a solution you can trust to be good. That’s why famous chefs sell lots and lots of books. People want to make food that tastes good, and these chefs know how to make (and teach you how to make) food that tastes good.

YOU’RE holding one part of a truly stellar phenomenon in the computing industry: the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition. This book is a key piece of a visionary effort that began more than two years ago with the introduction of the J2EE platform. In that time, the J2EE engineering team has defined a new ecosystem for networked computing and taught the world a new way to develop distributed applications.

Keeping up with the latest and greatest innovations in the high-tech industry is a job unto itself. My purpose in writing this book is to help you come up to speed as quickly as possible with using the Struts 1.1 framework. “Come up to speed” in this context means understanding the architecture and the technologies involved, as well as understanding how to start building applications.

This book is about Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1 and 2.0 the second and third versions of the Enterprise JavaBeans specification. Just as the Java platform has revolutionized the way we think about software development, Enterprise JavaBeans has revolutionized the way we think about developing mission-critical enterprise software. It combines server-side components with distributed object technologies and asynchronous messaging to greatly simplify the task of application development. It automatically takes into account many of the requirements of business systems: security, resource pooling, persistence, concurrency, and transactional integrity.

This User Guide is written for active web developers and assumes a working knowledge about how Java web applications are built. Before getting started, you should understand the basics of several core technologies: l HTTP, HTML, and User Agents l The HTTP Request/Response Cycle l The Java Language and Application Frameworks l JavaBeans l Properties Files and ResourceBundles l Java Servlets l JavaServer Pages and JSP Tag Libraries l Extensible Markup Language This chapter briefly defines each of these technologies but does not describe them in detail. For your convenience, links to further information are provided if you would like to learn more about a technology.

The Struts open source framework was created to make it easier for developers to build web applications based on Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies. Just like a building must have a solid foundation from which the rest of the structure can grow, web applications should be built with the same principle in mind. The Struts framework provides developers a unified framework from which Internet applications can be based upon. By using Struts as the foundation, developers are able to concentrate on building the business logic for the application.

Most well-architected EJB projects make use of design patterns. Whether or not a developer is actually aware that he’s using design patterns is another story. Oftentimes developers conceive of best practices during their projects, and aren’t aware that these best practices are actually design patterns—reusable approaches to programming—that are beneficial to other developers on their projects as well.

This document describes how to install Apache Axis. It assumes you already know how to write and run Java code and are not afraid of XML. You should also have an application server or servlet engine and be familiar with operating and deploying to it. If you need an application server, we recommend Jakarta Tomcat. [If you are installing Tomcat, get the latest 4.1.x version, and the full distribution, not the LE version for Java 1.4, as that omits the Xerces XML parser]. Other servlet engines are supported, provided they implement version 2.2 or greater of the servlet API. Note also that Axis client and server requires Java 1.3 or later.

JavaBeans is one of the most important developments in Java™ since its inception. It is Java's component architecture, which allows components built with Java to be used in graphical programming environments. Graphical development environments let you configure components by specifying aspects of their visual appearance (like the color or label of a button) in addition to the interactions between components (what happens when you click on a button or select a menu item). This means that someone can use a graphical tool to connect some Beans together and make an application without actually writing any Java code—in fact, without doing any programming at all.

When Java™ was first introduced in the summer of 1995, most of the IT industry focused on its graphical user interface characteristics and the competitive advantage it offered in terms of distribution and platform independence. Those were interesting times. The Applet was king, and only a few of us were attempting to use it on the server side. I reality we spent about half our time coding and the other half trying to convince management that Java was not a fad

This book has been a project spanning several years. Many have commented that the first edition was one of the best technical books they ever read. What’s made this book a reality are the many people that aided in its development. We took a big risk in developing the second edition of this book and decided to build the book on the Web.

This book gives a concise description of the Java 2 programming language, versions 1.3 and 1.4. It is a quick reference for the reader who has already learned (or is learning) Java from a standard textbook and who wants to know the language in more detail. The book presents the entire Java programming language and essential parts of the class libraries: the collection classes and the input-output classes. General rules are shown on left-hand pages mostly, and corresponding examples are shown on righthand pages only. All examples are fragments of legal Java programs.