The book is a practical, hands-on experience in building web applications based on XML and Java technologies. This book is unique because it teaches the technologies by using them to build a web chat project throughout the book. The project is explained in great detail, after the reader is shown how to get and install the necessary tools to be able to customize this project and build other web applications. The tools that are used are the extremely popular open-source tools from the Apache Software Foundation, namely Jakarta Tomcat, Apache Xerces and Apache Xalan. Of particular interest to readers will be the author's use in of XML in the book project as a language to express the architecture and design of the application itself, and not only the data content as is the usual case with “XML-based” applications. The book also contains some new and provocative techniques for XML storage using Java objects. This book will be especially useful for those developers who are interested in deploying web applications using Apache Jakarta and XML products on Windows platforms, but can be used by all web application developers.
About the Author
Westy Rockwell considers himself a world citizen. Currently he is a senior developer at tarent GmbH, a Web development company in Bonn, Germany. His greatest pleasure is enjoying the company of his wife, Zamina, and their two daughters, Joaquina and Jennifer. Somehow, they tolerate his intense involvement with computers.
Westy has more than 15 years of experience as a professional software developer, but his involvement with computers dates back longer yet. In 1965, he programmed the Pythagorean theorem into an IBM 1620 with punched cards. His faculty adviser told him to stop spending so much time on programming, which had no career future. In 1970, while studying IBM 360 programming, he was considered too radical for saying that computers would one day play chess. It was not until the early 1980s, with the arrival of microcomputers, that his career and his passion could merge.
