JavaServer Pages, Second Edition

Chapter 5. Generating Dynamic Content

JSP is all about generating dynamic content: content that differs based on user input, time of day, the state of an external system, or any other runtime conditions. JSP provides you with lots of tools for generating this content. In this book, you will learn about them all -- standard actions, custom actions, the JSP Standard Tag Library, JavaBeans, and scripting elements. Before going into all of that, however, let’s start with a simple example to get a better feel for how the basic JSP elements work.

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 web-page authoring tools -- the type of tools often used when developing regular HTML pages -- that supports JSP to some degree. You can browse through a fairly ...