The book is a practical, hands-on experience in building web applications based on XML and Java technologies. This book is unique because it teaches the technologies by using them to build a web chat project throughout the book. The project is explained in great detail, after the reader is shown how to get and install the necessary tools to be able to customize this project and build other web applications. The tools that are used are the extremely popular open-source tools from the Apache Software Foundation, namely Jakarta Tomcat, Apache Xerces and Apache Xalan. Of particular interest to readers will be the author's use in of XML in the book project as a language to express the architecture and design of the application itself, and not only the data content as is the usual case with "XML-based" applications. The book also contains some new and provocative techniques for XML storage using Java objects. This book will be especially useful for those developers who are interested in deploying web applications using Apache Jakarta and XML products on Windows platforms, but can be used by all web application developers.