Professional Java Servlets 2.3

What's Covered in this Book

The book has the following structure:

• We start with an overview of how and where servlets fit into the enterprise

• Chapters 2 and 3 cover the Servlet 2.3 API. We'll look at the lifecycle of servlets and understand how we can comsume and generate HTTP requests and responses.

• Although we'll have been running applications in earlier chapters, Chapter 4 explains the structure of a web application and how we should deploy them on a web server.

• Chapters 5–7 look at some of the powerful features of servlets - how we can maintain sessions, how we can persist servlets, and filters.

• In Chapter 8 we'll look at JavaServer Pages (JSP), which is a technology that is complimentary to Java Servlets.

• Chapters 9-11 will be spent looking at some of the issues that arise when web applications are deployed in production environments. We'll look at debugging techniques we can use to track down problems with our servlets and we'll understand the problems that can occur if we don't consider the effects of classloading and synchronization.

• In Chapters and 13 we'll look at how the design of our web applications can affect the performance and maintainability. We'll look at the various patterns we can use to create better applications and we'll look at some techniques and tools we can apply to improve the performance and scalability of our web applications.

• Finally, in Chapter 14 we'll look at how we can use servlets as agents, to access information from web services.