J2EE™ Tutorial, The

The Life Cycle of a JSP Page

A JSP page services requests as a servlet. Thus, the life cycle and many of the capabilities of JSP pages (in particular the dynamic aspects) are determined by Java Servlet technology and much of the discussion in this chapter refers to functions described in chapter 10.

When a request is mapped to a JSP page, it is handled by a special servlet that first checks whether the JSP page’s servlet is older than the JSP page. If it is, it translates the JSP page into a servlet class and compiles the class. During development, one of the advantages of JSP pages over servlets is that the build process is performed automatically.

Translation and Compilation

During the translation phase, each type of data in a JSP page is ...