Preface

Over the years, people have been asking the ASP.NET support team for the ability to develop web applications using a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. In October 2007, Scott Guthrie presented the frst preview of the ASP.NET MVC framework. Ever since, interest in this product has been growing, and many example applications and components have been released on the Internet by enthusiastic bloggers and Microsoft employees.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly was written to help people who have a basic knowledge of ASP.NET Webforms to quickly get up-to-speed with developing ASP.NET MVC applications. The book starts by explaining the MVC design pattern, and follows this with a bird's eye-view of what the ASP.NET MVC framework has to offer. After that, each chapter focuses on one aspect of the framework, providing in-depth details of the components that comprise the ASP.NET MVC framework. For each of the concepts explained, a to-the-point example application is provided, demonstrating the theory behind the concept.

By the time you fnish this book, you'll be well be on your way to mastering the ASP.NET MVC framework, and will have the confdence to build your own ASP.NET MVC applications.

About this book

The overall goal of this book is to inform and educate you on the exciting and powerful Silverlight 2 platform. Think of this book as a guided tour through the Silverlight 2 SDK. After you've completed this book, you should be able to confidently design, develop, and deliver rich interactive applications using Silverlight. To facilitate the learning process, we've structured this book to get you developing valuable applications as fast as possible, while providing quality, in-depth content.

Within each chapter, we've included a collection of devices to help you build a firm understanding of Silverlight. The following list explains how each agent helps along the journey:

• Figure— Visual depictions that summarize data and help with the connection of complex concepts.
• Snippet— Small, concise pieces of code primarily used for showing syntactical formats. These individual segments generally can't be run on their own.
• Table— Easy-to-read summarizations.
  

In addition to these valuable learning devices, we've created a companion website, the best tool of all. The http://www.silverlightinaction.com website will provide all the code samples used in this book. In addition, you'll be able to run these code samples directly from your browser! This website will also expose a number of web services and other items that you can use to try out the material you learn in this book.

about this book

Welcome to Ruby for Rails. This book is an introduction to the Ruby programming language, purpose-written for people whose main reason for wanting to know Ruby is that they’re working with, or are interested in working with, the Ruby on Rails framework and want to do Rails knowledgeably and right.

Ruby is a general-purpose, object-oriented, interpreted programming language designed and written by Yukihiro Matsumoto (known widely as “Matz”). Introduced in 1994, Ruby rose rapidly in popularity among Japanese programmers. By the early 2000s, more than twenty Japanese-language books on Ruby had been published. The first English-language book on Ruby, Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, appeared in late 2000 and ushered in a wave of Ruby enthusiasm outside of Japan. Ruby’s popularity in the West has grown steadily since the appearance of the “Pickaxe book” (the nickname of the Thomas-Hunt work, derived from its cover illustration).

But 2004 saw a second massive surge of interest, with the introduction of the Ruby on Rails Web application framework by David Heinemeier Hansson. Built on a cluster of separate component libraries, the Rails framework handles database storage and retrieval, HTML templating, and all the middle-layer work necessary to connect the underlying data to the Web pages and input forms that display and update it.

Wicket bridges the mismatch between the web's stateless protocol and Java's OO model. The component-based Wicket framework shields you from the HTTP under a web app so you can concentrate on business problems instead of the plumbing code. In Wicket, you use logic-free HTML templates for layout and standard Java for an application's behavior. The result? Coding a web app with Wicket feels more like regular Java programming.

Wicket in Action is a comprehensive guide for Java developers building Wicket-based web applications. It introduces Wicket's structure and components, and moves quickly into examples of Wicket at work. Written by core committers, this book shows you the "how-to" and the "why" of Wicket. You'll learn to use and customize Wicket components, to interact with Spring and Hibernate, and to implement rich Ajax-driven features.

About this Book

Tapestry is a comprehensive web application framework for the Java programming language. Tapestry is based on components, highly reusable building blocks that can be quickly and easily combined to form pages within your application. By using and reusing components, and creating your own components, you can create richly interactive, robust applications with only a modest effort.

Tapestry?s basic style is to break problems into smaller and smaller units; this complements a team development environment where different developers work on different parts of the application. The framework makes it easy for both Java and HTML-only developers to work together without accidentally undermining each other?s work.

When building a web application with any technology, you will be faced with a constant stream of questions: How do I figure out what the user has requested? Where can I store this bit of information? How can I safely add this new functionality? How can I make my application scale? In too many environments, it?s easy to make the wrong decision when confronted with any of these, and many other, development-time questions. It?s too easy to take a quick-and-dirty detour down the wrong path, which ultimately comes back to bite you when you are least prepared to deal with it.

The central goal of Tapestry is to make the easiest choice the correct choice. Over the course of this book, we?ll show you how to build applications using Tapestry, but we will also show you the hidden traps and tangles that Tapestry helps you to avoid.