Building web applications that are maintainable and extensible requires a significant amount of design and planning before even a single line of code can be written. However, by leveraging pre-written development frameworks, a development team can reduce the amount of time it takes to deploy an application, while at the same time promoting reuse. Traditionally, development frameworks required significant amounts of time and energy to implement. The alternative to implementing a framework was to purchase one, but this was often an expensive option that required a significant commitment to one software vendor.

Open source software has changed all of this. There are now several freely available Java development frameworks that can be used for developing web applications. These frameworks are straightforward to use, and because you have ready access to the frameworks' source code, they are also easy to customize for any organization's environment.

This book acts as a roadmap that will demonstrate how to use Jakarta development frameworks to solve everyday web application development challenges. Using our unique Problem-Design-Solution approach we will explore how the development frameworks from the Jakarta project, such as Struts, Velocity, Lucene, Cactus, and ObjectRelationalBridge can be used to develop web applications.

For each problem, the books discusses the solution's design and then how to implement it using the relevant framework. The problem domains covered include: Navigation, Screen layout, Form Validation, Business Rules, and Persistence.