JSP :- (Java Server Pages) is server side technology to create

dynamic java web application. It is considered as extension of

servlet technology. It provides features to easily create web
applicaiton.

JSP page :- consists of HTML code and provide option to include

java code for dynamic content. To bridge gap between java code and
HTML in jsp, it provides additional JSP tags.

Advantage :- We can generate HTML response from servlets also but

process is error prone and cumbersome, when it comes to writing
complex HTML response. JSP helps in this situtation and provide us flexibity
to write normal HTML page and include jsp code only where its'
required.

Life cycle of JSP page

JSP Page is also managed by web container. JSP pages life cycle
phasesa re:-

a) Translation : JSP page doens't look like normal java classes,

actually web container parse JSP page and traslate them to
generate corresponsding servlet source code. If JSP file name
is home.jsp, usally servlet class source code named as
home_jsp.java.

b) Compilation :- if translation is sucessful, then web container

compiles generated servlet source file to generate class file.

c) Class Loading :- Once JSP is compiled as servlet class, its

lifecycle is similar to servlet and it gets loaded into
memory.

d) Instance Createion :- web container instantiate Servlet class.

e) Initialization :- init() method call

f) Request Processing :- for every client request, ServletREquest

and ServletResponse object is createed and pass to service()
method to process and generate HTML resposne.

g) Destroy :- when servlet unloaded from memory.

If we put jsp page inside Web Pages directory, we can acess it

directly from browser using its name.
If we also put jsp page inside WEB-INF directory, we wont be able
to access it directly from browser.

<servlet>
<servlet-name>.....</servlet-name>
<jsp-file>........</jsp-file>
<servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>......</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>......</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
JSP Tags:-

a) JSP Comments Tag :- is used to write comments in JSP file.

HTML has also a comment tag :- <!-- Comments -->

HTML comments are sent to browser and we can look it with view
source option of browsers.

We can put comments in JSP files as :-

<%-- Comments --%>

This comment is sutiable for developers to provide code level

comments because these are not sent to browser.

b) JSP Scriptlets tag

Scriptlet tags are easiest way to put java code in a JSP page.
A scriplet tag starts with <% and ends with %>

Any code written inside the scriplet tags go into service() method.

<% java codes %>

c) JSP Expression tag

Since most of the times we print dynamic data in JSP page using
out.print() method, there is a shortcut to do this through
expression tag. JSP expression stats with <%= and ends with %>

<%= expression %>

Notic that anything between <%= %> is sent as paramter to

out.print() method.
Also notice that scriptlets can contain multiple java statement
and always ends with semicolon but expression doesn't end with
semicolon.

d) JSP Declarative tag

are used to declare member methods and variable of Servlet class.

JSP declaration starts with <%! and ends with %>