Java Server Pages

Acknowledgments

I love to write and have always wanted to write a book someday. After getting a number of articles about Java servlets and a couple of chapters for a server-side Java book published, my confidence was so high that I sent an email to O’Reilly & Associates and asked if they wanted me to write a book about JSP. Much to my surprise (I guess my confidence was not so high after all), they said, “Yes!” I knew that it would be more work than I could imagine, and it turned out to be even more than that. But here I am, almost a year later, with 17 chapters and 5 appendixes in a nice stack on my desk, written and rewritten countless times. All that remains is to give thanks to everyone who helped me fulfill this dream.

First, I’d like to thank my editors, Paula Ferguson and Bob Eckstein. Paula was the one who accepted my book proposal in the first place, and then helped me through my stumbling steps of writing the first half of the book. Bob came aboard for the second half, and I’m really grateful to him for thoroughly reading everything and giving me helpful advice.

Thanks also to Rob Romano for doing the illustrations, to Christien Shangraw for helping out with the coordination, and to all the production people behind the scenes at O’Reilly who made sure the book got published.

Big thanks also go to the JSP and servlet specification leads, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart and Danny Coward, for providing feedback, answering all my questions, and clarifying the vague and ambiguous areas of the specifications. You helped me more than I could ask for. I hope my contributions to the specifications repay my debt to some extent.

Thanks also to all of you who helped me improve the book in other ways: Jason Hunter for letting me borrow his connection pool code and Japanese examples; Craig McClanahan, Larry Riedel, Steve Jung (Steve dedicates his effort to the memory of his father, Arthur H. Jung, who passed away March 17, 2000), Sean Rohead, Jerry Croce, Steve Piccolo, and Vikram David for reviewing the book and giving me many suggestions for how to make it better; all the Apache Tomcat developers for making a great JSP reference implementation; and the members of the jsp-interest mailing list for all the ideas about what to cover in this book.

Finally, thanks to everyone who encouraged me and kept my spirits high: Mom, Dad, and my sister, for their support and for teaching me to do what I believe in; all my old friends in Sweden, especially Janne Ek, Peter Hellström (and his dad, who helped me with the translation of the German example), Janne Andersson, Roger Bjärevall and Michael Rohdin; Anne Helgren, my writing teacher who convinced me I could do this; and all the guys in and around Vesica Pisces (http://www.vesicapisces.com), Kelly, Brian, Adam, Bill, and James: I really enjoyed getting away from the writing now and then to hang with you and listen to you play.

-Hans Bergsten, September 2000