Tomcat + Ant, Object Persistence, and File-Serving Servlets

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Tomcat + Ant, Object Persistence, and File-Serving Servlets

by chromatic
ONJava Newsletter for 01/09/2003

Dear Readers,

It's time again for the ONJava.com newsletter. I hope you're spending a lazy afternoon in the sunshine, not stuck in a cold server room somewhere. We can't promise to raise the ambient temperature (unless you print out this email and burn it), but we can promise to tell you what's new this week. Here goes.

We often discuss technologies in isolation, but putting things together is highly important. Paul Wood's written a nice article on Tomcat 4, and more. Far more than just writing a Web application, he's put together JSPs, JavaBeans, MySQL, and Ant, on Mac OS X! There's lots of example code and explanation, so we've already had positive feedback on Creating a Web Application with Ant and Tomcat 4.

Any suitably large application will need to store data somehow. Relational databases are a popular option. When dealing with objects, though, it takes a lot of work to serialize them into rows and columns. The open source community has produced several projects to help this process. Charles Chan's Object-Relational Mapping with Apache Jakarta OBJ examines the OBJ framework for object serialization.

This week's book excerpt comes again from the new Java Enterprise Best Practices. This snippet discusses the curious case of sending file downloads from a servlet. You'd think it were easy, but getting the filename right across browsers is much trickier than it looks.

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Our weblogs this week feature your editor asking why SOAP is so much harder in Java than in Perl. Hopefully, he's wrong.

Until next time,

chromatic
O'Reilly Network Technical Editor
chromatic@oreilly.com