Creating a JSP Page
Recall from Chapter 3 that a JSP page is just a regular HTML page with a few special elements. A JSP page should have the file extension .jsp, which tells the server that the page needs to be processed by the JSP container. Without this clue, the server is unable to distinguish a JSP page from any other type of file and sends it unprocessed to the browser.
When working with JSP pages, you just need a regular text editor such as Notepad on Windows or Emacs on Unix. There are a number of tools that may make it easier for you, such as syntax-aware editors that color-code JSP and HTML elements. Some Interactive Development Environments (IDE) even include a small web container that allows you to easily execute and debug the pages during development. There are also several webpage authoring tools—the type of tools often used when developing regular HTML pages—that support JSP to some degree. You can browse through a fairly extensive list of tools like this at my web site: http://www.TheJSPBook.com/. I recommend that you do not use them initially, though; it’s easier to learn how JSP works if you see the raw page elements before you use tools that hide them.
The first example JSP page, named easy.jsp, is shown in Example 5-1.
<%@ page contentType="text/html" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %> <html> <head> <title>JSP is Easy</title> </head> <body bgcolor="white"> <h1>JSP ...Get JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
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