The End of the Book

I l @ ve RuBoard

Well, here you are, 18 chapters later, with a better understanding of what goes into integrating JSP and JDBC into a working Web site.

By now, you should understand that security is a critical consideration when deploying a Web site. You need to consider several types of security: physical, network, and administrative.

Hosting off-site reduces several of your security concerns and also might increase your reliability because of factors such as redundant power and network connections. You can spread the load between more than one server by using load balancing, and you can reduce the load by tuning your database properly and using Apache for mundane HTTP requests .

You should use SSL to encrypt secure traffic between the server and the client. This is difficult to do under Windows, and because Windows has security issues outside of SSL, you almost always want to deploy these types of solutions under Windows. Running SSL requires a certificate. Getting the certificate from a CA is the major delay in bringing up SSL on a site.

A few points are worth repeating before you dash off to implement the Great American Web Site:

• There is no replacement for having a good idea of what you want to do before you start trying to do it.

• You can spend so much time planning that you never get around to actually doing.

• Don't be afraid to rework or refactor in light of lessons learned.

• Keep up with the latest technologies, but don't feel that you have to use them just because they're trendy .

• Before writing a major piece of code, ask yourself whether anyone else has already done it and, if so, whether it can be reused or purchased?

All of the technologies used in this book are evolving ”some had active betas ongoing as the book went to press. Keep up with the latest advances ”new features can make the hard stuff easy but can also make what was easy hard.

Good luck, and good coding!

I l @ ve RuBoard