The Next 17 Chapters

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Okay, enough philosophy and political science. If you feel like you've been climbing up the roller coaster and are getting impatient for that first plunge, don't worry because the ground's about to fall out from under you.

In the next three chapters, we're going to provide a review of JSP and JDBC for those of you who have seen it, and a basic introduction for those who haven't. Then we're going to dive right in to our sample application and begin to apply the tools to a real-life problem.

First you will get your platform in place. Then you'll run a few tests to make sure that it works, and you'll get familiar with the building blocks that you'll be using. The building blocks are JSP, JDBC, and MySQL.

Next, you will go over the sample application using object-oriented design methodologies, including use cases and process flow diagrams. This ensures that by the time you actually get to the coding, you should already understand in your head what the site is supposed to look like.

Then you'll be ready to start coding. This book tends to lean toward a step-wise approach, getting one subsystem working and tested before moving forward to the next. This has the advantage of isolating problems to the most recently added code, and it also builds confidence by letting you see pieces of the site at work before the entire site is done.

You'll move through the site, starting with user login and registration and then moving to product display, purchase, shopping cart display, shipping and payment information capture, and finally checkout, fulfillment, and order history. Each section will be used to highlight different techniques and problem areas to watch out for. Most of these are culled from actual problems encountered during the development of real sites.

Even well-designed projects have a degree of trial and error, backtracking, and rethinking. This book attempts to capture as closely as possible the actual development process that you will go through while hammering out the sample application. When you've walked through the entire process, you should be well prepared to tackle your own JSP application, even if it's not a shopping-cart site.

I l @ ve RuBoard