This book takes the most stable, popular and useful sub-projects that form Jakarta Commons and provides much needed documentation and usage information on how best to incorporate them into Java applications.

Jakarta Commons are easily reusable components that can be quickly put to good use in any server-side Java development undertaken. The components are not big applications but sleek little bits of code that do a definite task very well. They might extend the core functionality of the Java language (the Lang sub-project), they might provide a Validation framework (Validator), a database connection pool (Pool) or even the means to easily manipulate XML and JavaBeans in a more intuitive and pragmatic fashion.