Beginning JavaServer Pages™

Chapter 12. Advanced Dynamic Web Content Generation

At this point in the book, you have examined and worked with every single aspect of JavaServer Pages. The knowledge that you have gained thus far can be put immediately to use in creating new Web applications using JSP technology, or in the maintenance of existing JSP projects. Although most of the projects in this book work mainly with the dynamic generation of HTML template data, creating interactive Web-based interfaces, this chapter focuses on the dynamic generation of content that is not HTML. While using exactly the same set of JSP techniques, the dynamic content generated will be client-side scripting elements and XML documents.

Client-side scripting elements, typically coded in the JavaScript programming language, can be used to enhance the user's interactive experience. One very practical application of JavaScript on the client side is for the validation of data entered within forms. The examples in this chapter show how JSP-generated client-side scripting elements can be used to perform client-side data validation.

Many concepts and techniques introduced in the previous chapters are put to work in this chapter. Concepts and techniques reviewed in this chapter include the following:

• Standard JSP actions

• JSP directives

• JSP actions

• JavaBeans

• Custom actions in JSTL

• EL

• Use of implicit objects

• Alternate XML syntax for JSP

• Using a front controller to forward requests

• Processing request parameters using JSP

• Creating a custom tag library using ...