JSP Tutorial

Introduction to JSP JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a technology based on the Java language and enables the development of dynamic web sites. JSP was developed by Sun Microsystems to allow server side development. JSP files are HTML files with special Tags containing Java source code that provide the dynamic content.   The following shows the Typical Web server, different clients connecting via the Internet to a Web server. In this example, the Web server is running on Unix and is the very popular Apache Web server. First static web pages were displayed. Typically these were people’s first experience with making web pages so consisted of My Home Page sites and company marketing information. Afterwards Perl and C were languages used on the web server to provide dynamic content. Soon most languages including Visualbasic, Delphi, C++ and Java could be used to write applications that provided dynamic content using data from text files or database requests. These were known as CGI server side applications. ASP was developed by Microsoft to allow HTML developers to easily provide dynamic content supported as standard by Microsoft’s free Web Server, Internet Information Server (IIS). JSP is the equivalent from Sun Microsystems, a comparison of ASP and JSP will be presented in the following section. The following diagram shows a web server that supports JSP files. Notice that the web server also is connected to a database.   JSP source code runs on the web server in the JSP Servlet Engine. The JSP Servlet engine dynamically generates the HTML and sends the HTML output to the client’s web browser.