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JSP Tag Libraries Review by visualbuilder.com
Best book on JSP Tags
There are now quite a few JSP books around and some of them mention JSP Tag libraries. In a typical n-tier web application, JSP tag libraries enable the presentation layer to be cleanly separated from the business layer. This allows simple scripted pages to call complex Java code without confusing the HTML web page Developer. By using JSP tag libraries, the developers have reusable code that can provide easy access to different J2EE services.
This book starts of with a quick introduction to dynamic web servers, Java servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP). We recommend that readers new to JSP should read a book dedicated to JSP before reading this one. Chapter 3 begins with an explaination of JSP custom tags, setting up the environment (Tomcat) and creating a simple Hello World tag. The authors provide enough information to explain the example without confusing the reader. They also suggest solutions to why the example might not work, providing a useful insight into what to check if something goes wrong.
Chapter 4 gives an overview of the tag API (interface and methods) and Chapter 4 explains how to create a tag lib descriptor (TLD) and how the JSP runtime uses this information to produce a servlet. Chapter 6 and 7 present some coding techniques to build a tag library and use an example of building a tag library for sending email. This is a simple and effective example that describes the process of developing and using JSP tab libraries.
Chapter 8 is important because it describes in detail how to use JavaBeans with tags. Starting off with information about the Reflection API, the authors show how to create a JavaBean and use Tags to present the information. This technique allows the developer to remove a lot of Java code from the JSP, making the page easier to understand and maintain. Chapter 9 and 10 show how to develop condition and interating tags.
Chapter 11 focuses on designing a database presentation tag library. This chapter answers many useful questions such as, Why not just wrap everything in a JavaBean? Again the authors give an exellent explaination of a very important topic. Realistically many readers would not be accessing a database directly from a tag library so the next chapters present J2EE and how to access Enterprise JavaBeans using tag libraries.
Chapters 13 and 14 are very interesting because they explain two case studies; a JDBC-driven web store and an EJB driven WAP store. The authors go over the design and development in quite a bit of detail and it is useful to all readers wanting to use JSP tag libraries in their projects. The last chapter covers tips and tricks, showing how to generalize tags using the Command design pattern and discussing maintainence, performance and debugging.
Suprisingly, the Apache Struts project is not mentioned in this book, however many of the concepts found in Struts are explained here. The authors have done an excellent job in explaining how to develop and use JSP tag libraries. We found the authors' insight very useful and on the whole the book is easy to read.
visualbuilder.com