J2EE™ Tutorial, The

Including Content in a JSP Page

There are two mechanisms for including another Web resource in a JSP page: the include directive and the jsp:include element.

The include directive is processed when the JSP page is translated into a servlet class. The effect of the directive is to insert the text contained in another file— either static content or another JSP page—in the including JSP page. You would probably use the include directive to include banner content, copyright information, or any chunk of content that you might want to reuse in another page. The syntax for the include directive is as follows:

<%@ include file="filename" %> 

For example, all the bookstore application pages include the file banner.jsp containing the banner content ...