Summary, and on to the Advanced Stuff

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As you've learned in this chapter, even when the application is mostly done, still a bit of work can be left to do.

Credit card authorization requires integrating into a third-party application ”luckily, this is an easy process because most authorization companies have simple Java-based interfaces. You might also need to integrate into existing accounting, shipping, or inventory systems. You also need to consider database integrity issues during critical "two-phase" operations, such as charging credit cards and then recording an order.

Finishing an application also involves making sure that the code is commented as appropriate and that Javadoc has been written for any externally visible methods .

Break Out the Champagne

You're done! You've got a fully functional e-commerce site up and running and ready to sell books to the masses. Hopefully this walk-through has shown you some tricks and techniques that will help you, whether you're doing a shopping cart site or a company intranet.

In the next few chapters, we'll look at some of the more advanced things that you can do with Tomcat. We'll look at the Struts framework, designed to implement the MVC design paradigm. If you're into design patterns, this is the kind of platform that you'll enjoy deploying on. We'll also look at Enterprise Java beans.

Getting data back and forth and sharing it between applications is more and more critical every day. We'll look at XML, and how you can use Xerces to get XML in and out of Java with a minimum of pain.

LDAP is the other hot data sharing mechanism, and JNDI is how Java likes to talk to it. We'll look at some sample JNDI code, and I'll take you through the often tricky task of adding, modifying and querying an LDAP server.

Finally, we'll spend some time talking about performance considerations with Tomcat. We'll look at the issue of load balancing and failover, and how to integrate Apache with Tomcat to allow Apache to serve your static content, and handle SSL traffic for greater security.

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