How to Use This Book

What You Need

This book requires that you have a PC running with either NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP Professional or Server version so you can utilize Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). Note that the professional versions of these operating systems will not allow you to use SSL, but you can use Apache with SSL on any of them.

You will also need either Visual Studio.NET or the .NET Framework Software Development Kit to compile and execute the C# examples.

To compile and run the Java examples, you need a Java Development Kit for compilation and a Servlet container to execute the examples. The book uses Tomcat from the Apache group as the container but any other container such as Sun One Server or BEA’s Weblogic should work just fine. Note that you don’t need the professional versions of the Windows operating systems to use the Java examples, but without them you’ll be limited to just Java and won’t be able to use any of the cross-platform examples.

Note

Appendix B contains the URLs for downloading the various software needed for this book.