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Another LWG User Group Book Review:

MAC OS X FOR JAVA GEEKS

by Will Iverson

I had been playing around with my PowerBook G4 as a webserver (using Apache), building some PHP-based applications, and serving them up locally during development. PHP is great for quick deployment of server-side web pages, but I had wanted to try my hand at developing Java-based web apps. I didn't really know where to start, but then I found Mac OS X for Java Geeks.

Using this book as my guide, I was able to:

Install and configure Apache Tomcat

Write and deploy my first "Hello World" JSP

Write and deploy my first Servlet

Deploy a working JSP that accesses a MySQL database

For me, this book has been invaluable... and I've only used two chapters! Will Iverson has created a volume that has something for everyone-- but most people will only use a part of the book.

Everyone can benefit from his overview of the JVM on Mac OS X, as well as the chapter on Java development tools.

If you want to develop web-based Java applications, there are chapters on Applets, JSPs and Servlets, Web services such as SOAP, and even using JBoss to serve EJBs.

If you hope to develop applications for the Mac platform, there are chapters on creating Mac applications, and interfacing with Mac OS gems such as Quicktime (read the sample chapter on Quicktime), Mac OS speech, and the Mac OS spelling framework.

The book is filled with great figures and examples, and readers looking to get their feet wet can build a swing application called SimpleEdit, which is used throughout the book as something to build on with newly acquired knowledge.

If you are planning to do any work in Java and the Mac is your development (or deployment) platform, you gotta get this book. I know I'll be coming back to it over and over.

Last modified 10/12/2003.

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