Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices at Dominant Systems Book Store

In-depth examination of concepts and principles of Web application development

Completely revised and updated, this popular book returns with coverage on a range of new technologies. Authored by a highly respected duo, this edition provides an in-depth examination of the core concepts and general principles of Web application development. Packed with examples featuring specific technologies, this book is divided into three sections: HTTP protocol as a foundation for Web applications, markup languages (HTML, XML, and CSS), and survey of emerging technologies. After a detailed introduction to the history of Web applications, coverage segues to core Internet protocols, Web browsers, Web application development, trends and directions, and more.

Includes new coverage on technologies such as application primers, Ruby on Rails, SOAP, XPath, P3P, and more
Explores the fundamentals of HTTP and its evolution
Looks at HTML and its roots as well as XML languages and applications
Reviews the basic operation of Web Servers, their functionality, configuration, and security
Discusses how to process flow in Web browsers and looks at active browser pages
Addresses the trends and various directions that the future of Web application frameworks may be headed

This book is essential reading for anyone who needs to design or debug complex systems, and it makes it easier to learn the new application programming interfaces that arise in a rapidly changing Internet environment.

Customer Reviews & Comments
I was fortunate enough to be an undergrad in college in the early to mid 90's when Internet was taking off. This gave me the opportunity to use the world wide web long before Internet access at home was commonplace. I've been involved with the web as a user since the early 1990's, and as a developer since the mid/late 1990's. The first chapters of this book were a trip down memory lane for me, I remember scouring public FTP sites for open source/shareware/freeware software I could install on my PC at home, or even use on the Unix boxes of the university. I remember using telnet to connect to remote systems around campus. When the world wide web came around, I remember using the Mosaic browser being flabbergasted at how cool it all was. Nowadays, a lot of web application developers never had the opportunity to use these earlier protocols that were commonplace before the world wide web took off. This book provides an overview of these protocols. Additionally, in this day an age, we have several powerful IDE's, frameworks and libraries that make our lives easier when developing web applications. While these tools are a boon to productivity, in many cases these tools shield web application developers from what actually happens "behind the scenes". The proliferation of these tools have caused a new generation of web developers that are not familiar with fundamentals such as the HTTP protocol, XML and even HTML and Javascript. Shklar and Rosen present these fundamentals in a clear, concise way. After going through this book, web application developers will have enough knowledge to know what is going on behind all their IDE generated applications that rely on a bunch of libraries. They also compare several approaches to web application development, such as programmatic, template based, hybrids and frameworks. The book has a lot of breadth and by necessity not a lot of depth, however it provides enough information for the reader to become sufficiently versed in these topics, should he/she ever need to dig down and see what is going on behind the scenes of the application being developed. One minor complaint I have about the book is that the authors chose to use Struts 1 as their framework of choice for one of their case study application, Struts 1 is considered by many to be an obsolete framework. The authors also seem less than enthusiastic about JSF, which personally I have found to be a better, more intuitive framework than Struts. To their credit, JSF 2.0, which adds a lot of very nice features, was released around the same time this book was published.

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