Weighing in at over 1,400 pages, Professional Java Server Programming provides a wide-reaching resource of all of the APIs that are required for J2EE development that centers on servlets and JSPs for creating UIs and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), XML, and JDBC for getting to data on the server. Besides being a practical guide to how to combine these standards (with plenty of useful examples of these APIs in action), it also delivers a healthy dose of the design philosophy that's recommended by Sun for building scalable and robust enterprise Web applications.

Throughout, this text does a good job of merging theory with practice. Almost every chapter has a useful working example that shows how APIs work, with sample code for such Web applications as an e-commerce shopping cart, tech support pages, and a front end for a manufacturing database. The core of this volume is its treatment of servlets and JSPs for building Web-based front ends in Java. This new edition also highlights EJBs in excellent detail, with a thorough tour of designing, programming, and deploying EJBs effectively. (There's also notable coverage of the emerging EJB 2.0 standard, which adds several important features, like a query language for more powerful database access.)

The practical focus here is reflected also in chapters that are devoted to debugging, testing, and deploying J2EE applications--critical issues for any aspiring enterprise developer. While no single book can make you an expert, this one can get you started with a superb tour of the APIs and technologies that you'll need to tackle large-scale development in Java. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Introduction to enterprise computing with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform (technologies, APIs, architectures; development roles)
• Introduction to RMI (including security, parameter passing, and distributed garbage collection)
• JDBC tutorial (including prepared statements, updateable result sets, batch updates, connection pooling, and distributed transactions)
• JNDI and LDAP
• XML basics (including XML parsers, XSLT, and CSS)
• Servlet tutorial (servlet APIs, the servlet life cycle, requests and responses, and maintaining session information)
• Shopping cart servlet example
• JavaServer Pages (JSPs) tutorial (directives, scripting elements, custom tags, and tag libraries)
• JSP coding standards
• Using JSP and XML together
• JavaMail
• Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) tutorial
• EJB containers
• Design guidelines for EJBs
• Session and entity beans
• Container vs. bean-managed persistence
• New EJB 2.0 features (including the EJB 2 0 Query Language)
• Sun's Model-View-Controller architecture for designing enterprise-level applications
• Performance and scalability hints
• Debugging and testing techniques
• The Java Message Service (JMS) and message queuing
• Integrating J2EE with CORBA
• Deploying J2EE applications