JavaServer Pages, Second Edition

Readers of the First Edition

If you’ve read the first edition of JavaServer Pages, you’ll notice that, in this edition, most of the custom components have been replaced in favor of the equivalent standard components from JSTL -- a specification I’ve been lucky enough to contribute to and help shape the standard based on many of the ideas explored in the first edition. You’ll also notice that all the chapters have been substantially improved and extended, and that new chapters have been added to highlight important features, such as custom actions and JavaBeans components, and to explain how to process XML data, and how to integrate your custom components with the standard JSTL components.

All chapters have also been updated to cover the features and clarifications added in the JSP 1.2 and Servlet 2.3 (which JSP 1.2 is based on) specifications, primarily:

• New XML syntax for JSP pages

• New listener and filter component types

• New tag library validator

• New options for tag library deployment and distribution

• New tag handler interfaces and return values

• New tag library descriptor elements to minimize the need for TagExtraInfo classes

• Improved support for pages stored in encodings other than ISO-8859-1

• Improved rules and a new mechanism for attribute-value conversion

• Improvements to the include action

• Clarifications of the reuse of tag handler instances and their life cycle

• Alignment of the tag library descriptor elements with the elements in other J2EE descriptors