Hi Tony,
Apologies about the TOC at wrox.com - have you taken a look at my version which is taken from the introduction to my book? It can be found
here.
Just to provide some context, I see custom tags as a fantastic mechanism for wrapping up common, reusable presentation-based functionality for use on JSP pages and as such, I tried to steer away from covering topics like how to access databases and instead wanted to provide a solid foundation for anybody wanting to develop custom tags.
For this reason, chapters 1 to 7 cover all of the tag "basics" - simple tags, tag attributes, tag body content, introducting scripting variables, iterating with tags,
body tags (chapter 6) and cooperating tags. However, rather than just have tutorials on how to implement the functionality, there are alternatives to choose and commentary covering some of the best practices, rules of thumb and recommendations on which alternative is most applicable for the job.
The book then steps up a gear to cover what, IMHO, isn't often covered online and in print. This includes topics like custom tags vs. JavaBeans,
common uses for tags/tag patterns (chapter 8), and also the principles around good design that relates tags back to OO and component-based development.
Then there's some quite advanced material on how to best handle exceptions, how the container can pool tag handler instances and what this means for us as developers. Another area that isn't often covered is that of tag validation - things like TagExtraInfo classes and the new JSP 1.2 TagLibraryValidator. Following on from this is deployment, discussing the several ways in which tags can be deployed into the container. Finally, to wrap off we have a case study that makes extensive use of custom tags and a chapter introducing some of the 3rd party tag libraries that are available.
The only big area that I unfortunately didn't get time to cover was that of how to test custom tags. Hopefully the TagUnit project will rectify that.
All in all, I went for a slightly different approach. Please do check out the detailed contents and feel free to e-mail me (simon at javaranch.com) if you have any questions.
As for the JSTL - it's definitely worth learning as it will ultimately make building JSPs much easier.
Cheers
Simon
[ July 31, 2002: Message edited by: Simon Brown ]