JavaServer Pages, Second Edition

Acknowledgments for Second Edition

Roughly a year and a half have passed since I finished the first edition of this book, and, man, have things changed! JSP 1.2 has been released, adding new features, big and small, as well as minor adjustments and clarifications. The big news in the JSP space, though, is the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL). This library includes actions for most common JSP tasks, making it possible to replace almost all the custom actions I used for the first edition with the corresponding standard version. To cover all the new stuff, I ended up rewriting almost every chapter, and even added a few new ones. At the same time, I clarified a number of things that readers of the first edition have asked me about. It was a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy the result.

I would like to thank all readers of the first edition for your feedback, especially Ingo Kegel for the refined German text he sent me for the I18N example, and Mike Braden, Lucy Newman, and Masako Onishi for contributing instructions for running the examples with a number of different database engines, posted on the book’s web site.

I really appreciate all the help I got from my review team, especially from Steve Bang who picked the book to pieces and gave me many helpful suggestions; and Janne Andersson, Marcus Biervliet, and Pierre Delisle -- thanks for spending your precious time reading and sending me feedback.

Many thanks also go to my fellow JSTL and JSP specification group members, especially James Strachan and Shawn Bayern for helping me understand the finer points of XML processing and XPath, and to Pierre Delisle and Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart for running such a smooth process and putting up with my stubbornness in certain areas (you know what I mean) and comments about many picky details.

I would also like to thank Richard Monson-Haefel (author of Enterprise JavaBeans, O’Reilly) for explaining the meaning of the J2EE resource declaration details, and George Reese (author of Database Programming with JDBC and Java, O’Reilly) for verifying my understanding of how JDBC 2.0 connection pooling is supposed to work and for reviewing Chapter 23.

Thanks also to Bob Eckstein, my editor, for moral support, thoughtful comments, and stacks of hardcopy with scribbled notes, and to all the production people behind the scenes at O’Reilly who made sure the book got published.

Finally, thanks to my parents, my sister and her family, and to all my friends in the real world and in cyberspace, for encouragement and inspiration.

—Hans Bergsten