Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Wrapping Up

We’ve just gone through a great deal of JSP material, and you should now have a pretty good grasp of the range of capabilities provided by JSPs. Obviously, there is more depth and nuance than we can cover in a tutorial chapter, but the material we’ve discussed covers the full range of capabilities. For more information, there are several good sources. The first is Hans Bergsten’s excellent book JavaServer Pages (O’Reilly), which provides more detail on some of the features we’ve flown rather lightly over, and also addresses internationalization, database access from JSPs, and other important approaches to putting all the pieces together.

For tag developers, another necessary stop is the Jakarta Taglibs project, one of several groups working on putting together a standardized, well-tested set of tags, at http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/index.html. The taglibs project includes tags to handle a wide array of tasks, and can save days or weeks of custom development. Many of these tags will eventually work their way into the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL), currently under development as part of the Java Community Process.

Finally, before deploying JSP, take a look at some of the other Java-based content frameworks, such as the Jakarta Velocity project (http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity). Velocity provides a different, less code-focused approach to templating that many nonprogrammers find easier to deal with. Which solution is appropriate for your application depends ...