Book excerpt: This comprehensive textbook introduces readers to the three-tiered, Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture by using Hibernate, JSPs, and Java Servlets. These three technologies all use Java, so that a student with a background in programming will be able to master them with ease, with the end result of being able to create web applications that use MVC, validate user input and save data to a database. Features: presents the many topics of web development in small steps, in an accessible, easy-to-follow style; uses powerful technologies that are freely available on the web to speed up web development, such as JSP, JavaBeans, annotations, JSTL, Java 1.5, Hibernate and Tomcat; discusses HTML, HTML Forms, Cascading Style Sheets and XML; introduces core technologies from the outset, such as the MVC architecture; contains questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, detailed illustrations, chapter summaries, and a glossary; includes examples for accessing common web services.