Rich Rosen

Have you ever been off on a trip, away from your home or office computer, and wanted (no, needed!) to check your e-mail? Or have you ever been stuck at a location where firewalls or other network limitations prevented you from accessing your mail or sending mail to others? E-mail has become a lifeline for many people. For some, it's the main mechanism for staying in touch with others. (Many have been known to check their e-mail more frequently than they check their voicemail or answering machine.) For an increasing number of people, being able to access e-mail is not just a luxury, it's an absolute necessity. How do you check your e-mail when you don't have access to your own computer? Of course, you need a computer with an Internet connection, but that's just the beginning. In the olden days, before the existence of the Web, it was rather simple. You could telnet to... (more)

A Brief History of Tags

Custom tags in JavaServer Pages have come a long way since their inception. Now that Sun has provided some standards for these tags in the form of JSTL (and the up-and-coming JavaServer Faces), and has promised additional support for these standards in JSP 2.0, let's look at how we got to this point in tag history, and where we're going in the future. (In addition, let's look at how we can use the JSTL taglibs and the Struts Taglibs that support the JSTL expression language right now.) Tag-based approaches to Web application development are nothing new. Their origins can be trac... (more)