Web Server Programming

Chapter 8
Java Server Pages

• Getting Tomcat, javax.servlet.*, and the documentation; see the notes for Chapter 7 - Servlets, and remember the warning about the effects of version changes.
• On line tutorials, sources of scripts, etc;
• Example material relating to text.

JSPs appear to have many more friends than do plain old servlets. Though still not on the scale of PHP and Perl, there is large amount of material out on the web and new articles are being published regularly. Tag libraries remain popular with moves to standardize some of the more sophisticated custom tag libraries and make them part of the revised JSP standard.

Naturally, Sun is the home site for everything related to JSPs. Sun's offerings include:

• A product overview with links to the specifications, details of future plans, industry links etc.
• The associated documentation page has links to several tutorials, and links to articles that have been published in last three years at Sun, or in JavaWorld.
• A set of technical articles including a recent "best practices" article.

There is much emphasis on tag libaries. The original jsp tag set was too limited and many developers created their own tag libraries. Some were home-made, some were proprietary projects of companies who sold servlet engines. The most commonly used were the struts tag library, and the taglib tag library - both being collaborative open source projects hosted in the Jakarta subpart of Apache.

The use of a mix of tag libraries is obviously determinental to maintenance. The situation is being corrected with the introduction of the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL). The Apache taglibs project now has the reference implementation for JSTL and this more extensive library will become a part a standard JSP system in the future. THe JSTL has several parts; one is a set of tags for iteration, selection and so forth. Another part includes tags for submitting SQL queries. There is also a new "expression language" that offers an alternative to scriptlet coding that is supposed to be easier for web designers to use.

The Java Server Faces tag library is the servlet/JSP equivalent of the .NET event driven model for interaction with elements of a form page.

The OnJava part of the O'Reilly site has a large collection of JSP articles; recent articles including a series on the struts tag package and some on the JSP Standard Tag Library.

Google has a page of JSP links. There are numerous JSP links at JSpin and at JDance.

A few of the examples from the text are available.