Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages, Volume 2 Advanced Technologies

by Hall, Marty; Brown, Larry; Chaikin, Yaakov

• ISBN13: 9780131482609
• ISBN10: 0131482602
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-27
• Publisher: PEARSO

Summary

Java EE is the technology of choice for e-commerce applications, interactive Web sites, and Web-enabled services. Servlet and JSP technology provides the link between Web clients and server-side applications on this platform.Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages, Volume 2: Advanced Technologies, Second Edition,is the definitive guide to the advanced features and capabilities provided by servlets and JSP. Volume 2presents advanced capabilities like custom tag libraries, filters, declarative security, JSTL, and Struts. Like the first volume, it teaches state-of-the-art techniques and best practices illustrated with complete, working, fully documented programs. Volume 2explains in detail the advanced tools and techniques needed to build robust, enterprise-class applications. You'll learn how to control application behavior through the web.xml deployment descriptor file, how to enhance application security through both declarative and programmatic methods, and how to use servlet and JSP filters to encapsulate common behavior. You'll also learn how to control major application lifecycle events, best practices for using JSTL, and how to build custom tag libraries. Volume 2 concludes with an in-depth introduction to the Jakarta Struts framework. Complete source code for all examples is available free for unrestricted use at www.volume2.coreservlets.com . For information on Java training from Marty Hall, go to courses.coreservlets.com . Volume 1presents comprehensive coverage of the servlets and JSP specifications, including HTTP headers, cookies, session tracking, JSP scripting elements, file inclusion, the MVC architecture, and the JSP expression language. It also covers HTML forms, JDBC, and best practices for design and implementation.

Author Biography

Marty Hall is the president of coreservlets.com, a leading provider of Java training and consulting services. Marty has given courses on Java technologies in seven countries and dozens of U.S. venues, and directs the Java and Web-related concentration areas in the part-time Computer Science graduate program at the Johns Hopkins University. His books include all editions of Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages, More Servlets and JavaServer Pages, and Core Web Programming.

Larry Brown is an IT manager at a U.S. Navy Research and Development Laboratory, and coauthor of Core Web Programming, Second Edition (Prentice Hall, 2001).

Yaakov Chaikin, senior consultant at a software development company based in Columbia, MD, heads the Web Development track at Loyola College's graduate computer science program.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xvii
Who Should Read This Book	p. viii
Conventions	p. xix
About the Web Site	p. xx
Acknowledgments	p. xxi
	p. xxii
Using and Deploying Web Applications	p. 21
Purpose of Web Applications	p. 3
Structure of Web Applications	p. 5
Registering Web Applications with the Server	p. 9
Development and Deployment Strategies	p. 14
The Art of War: Bundling Web
Building a Simple Web Application	p. 18
Sharing Data Among Web Applications	p. 25
Controlling Web Application Behavior with Web.XML	p. 34
Purpose of the Deployment Descriptor	p. 35
Defining the Header and the Root Element	p. 36
The Elements of web.xml	p. 37
Assigning Names and Custom URLs	p. 42
Disabling the Invoker Servlet	p. 52
Initializing and Preloading Servlets and JSP Pages	p. 56
Declaring Filters	p. 68
Specifying Welcome Pages	p. 71
Designating Pages to Handle Errors	p. 72
Providing Security	p. 78
Controlling Session Timeouts	p. 83
Documenting Web Applications	p. 84
Associating Files with MIME Types	p. 85
Configuring JSP Pages	p. 86
Configuring Character Encoding	p. 93
Designating Application Event Listeners	p. 93
Developing for the Clustered Environment	p. 95
J2EE Elements	p. 97
Declarative Security	p. 104
Form-Based Authentication	p. 106
Example: Form-Based Authentication	p. 122
Basic Authentication	p. 143
Example: Basic Authentication	p. 147
Configuring Tomcat to Use SSL	p. 156
WebClient: Talking to Web Servers Interactively	p. 164
Signing a Server Certificate	p. 167
Programmatic Security	p. 178
Combining Container-Managed and Programmatic Security	p. 180
Example: Combining Container-Managed and Programmatic Security	p. 183
Handling All Security Programmatically	p. 188
Example: Handling All Security Programmatically	p. 190
Using Programmatic Security with SSL	p. 195
Example: Programmatic Security and SSL	p. 197
Servlet and JSP Filters	p. 202
Creating Basic Filters	p. 204
Example: A Reporting Filter	p. 210
Accessing the Servlet Context from Filters	p. 217
Example: A Logging Filter	p. 218
Using Filter Initialization Parameters	p. 221
Example: An Access Time Filter	p. 223
Blocking the Response	p. 226
Example: A Prohibited-Site Filter	p. 227
Modifying the Response	p. 234
Example: A Replacement Filter	p. 237
Example: A Compression Filter	p. 245
Configuring Filters to Work with RequestDispatcher	p. 251
Example: Plugging a Potential Security Hole	p. 253
The Complete Filter Deployment Descriptor	p. 260
The Application Events Framework	p. 266
Monitoring Creation and Destruction of the Servlet Context	p. 270
Example: Initializing Commonly Used Data	p. 271
Detecting Changes in Servlet Context Attributes	p. 277
Example: Monitoring Changes to Commonly Used Data	p. 278
Packaging Listeners with Tag Libraries	p. 288
Example: Packaging the Company Name Listeners	p. 290
Recognizing Session Creation and Destruction	p. 297
Example: A Listener That Counts Sessions	p. 298
Watching for Changes in Session Attributes	p. 306
Example: Monitoring Yacht Orders	p. 307
Identifying Servlet Request Initialization and Destruction	p. 314
Example: Calculating Server Request Load	p. 315
Watching Servlet Request for Attribute Changes	p. 322
Example: Stopping Request Frequency Collection	p. 323
Using Multiple Cooperating Listeners	p. 325
The Complete Events Deployment Descriptor	p. 339
Tag Libraries: The Basics	p. 346
Tag Library Components	p. 348
Example: Simple Prime Tag	p. 353
Assigning Attributes to Tags	p. 357
Example: Prime Tag with Variable Length	p. 359
Including Tag Body in the Tag Output	p. 362
Example: Heading Tag	p. 364
Example: Debug Tag	p. 368
Creating Tag Files	p. 371
Example: Simple Prime Tag Using Tag
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Suppose your company wants to sell products online. You have a database that gives the price and inventory status of each item. However, your database doesn't speak HTTP, the protocol that Web browsers use. Nor does it output HTML, the format Web browsers need. What can you do? Once users know what they want to buy, how do you gather that information? You want to customize your site for visitors' preferences and interests, but how? You want to keep track of user's purchases as they shop at your site, but what techniques are required to implement this behavior? When your Web site becomes popular, you might want to compress pages to reduce bandwidth. How can you do this without causing your site to fail for those visitors whose browsers don't support compression? In all these cases, you need a program to act as the intermediary between the browser and some server-side resource. This book is about using the Java platform for this type of program."Wait a second," you say. "Didn't youalreadywrite a book about that?" Well, yes. In May of 2000, Sun Microsystems Press and Prentice Hall released Marty Hall's second book,Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages. It was successful beyond everyone's wildest expectations, selling approximately 100,000 copies, getting translated into Bulgarian, Chinese simplified script, Chinese traditional script, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, and being chosen by Amazon.com as one of the top five computer programming books of 2001. What fun!Since then, use of servlets and JSP has continued to grow at a phenomenal rate. The Java 2 Platform has become the technology of choice for developing e-commerce applications, dynamic Web sites, and Web-enabled applications and service. Servlets and JSP continue to be the foundation of this platform--they provide the link between Web clients and server-side applications. Virtually all major Web servers for Windows, UNIX (including Linux), Mac OS, VMS, and mainframe operating systems now support servlet and JSP technology either natively or by means of a plug-in. With only a small amount of configuration, you can run servlets and JSP in Microsoft IIS, the Apache Web Server, IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, Oracle Application Server 10g, and dozens of other servers. Performance of both commercial and open-source servlet and JSP engines has improved significantly.To no one's surprise, this field continues to grow at a rapid rate. As a result, we could no longer cover the technology in a single book.Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages, Volume 1: Core Technologies, covers the servlet and JSP capabilities that you are likely to use in almost every real-life project. This book,Volume 2: Advanced Technologies, covers features that you may use less frequently but are extremely valuable in robust applications. For example, Deployment descriptor file. Through the proper use of the deployment descriptor file, web.xml, you can control many aspects of the Web application behavior, from preloading servlets, to restricting resource access, to controlling session time-outs. Web application security. In any Web application today, security is a must! The servlet and JSP security model allows you to easily create login pages and control access to resources. Custom tag libraries. Custom tags significantly improve the design of JSPs. Custom tags allow you to easily develop your own library of reusable tags specific to your business applications. In addition to creating your own tags, we cover the Standard Tag Library (JSTL). Event handling. With the events framework, you can control initialization and shutdown of the Web application, recognize destruction of HTTP sessions, and set application-wide values. Servlet and JSP filters. With filters, you can apply many pre- and post-processing actions. Fo