| I have been teaching web development for ten years. I started with Perl. I can still remember the behemoth programs that contained all the logic and HTML. I remember using a text editor to write the program. Debugging consisted of a lot of print statements. It was a fun time, full of exploration, but I do not miss them.
Five years ago, I made the move to Java and Java servlets. Life became much simpler with the use of NetBeans. It has been a critical component in developing Web applications using Java. Debugging a web application in NetBeans is just as easy as debugging any Java application. This book is meant for students who have a solid background in programming, but who do not have any database training. Until two years ago, my students used a glorifi ed HashMap to save data. Then a former student gave me the word: Hibernate. For anyone with a programming background in Java, using Hibernate to save data to a relational database is a simple task.
I have always been a proponent of automating the common tasks that Web applications perform. There are many packages that can simplify the job of a Web developer: Log4j, BeanUtils and Hibernate. I have created additional classes that can automate additional tasks. Readers of this book should have a good background in Java programming.
The book uses HTML, HTML Forms, Cascading Style Sheets and XML as tools. Each topic will receive an introduction, but the full scope of the area will not be explored. The focus of the book is on Java Servlets that use Java Server Pages and connect to a MySQL database using Hibernate. No SQL will be covered in the book, except for a short section in the Appendix for those who want to see what Hibernate is doing.
I am grateful to the community of web developers, who have provided all the excellent tools for creating web applications: Apache, Tomcat, Hibernate, Java Servlets, Java Server Pages, NetBeans, Log4j, Commons.
I am thankful to Bobbi, my sweetheart, for all of her love and support. Without Bobbi, this book would not have been fi nished. I also want to thank Kip Irvine for encouraging me to write. Without Kip, this book would never have been started. |
