J2EE™ and Beyond: Design, Develop, and Deploy World-Class Java™ Software

How JSP Works

The Java servlet technology historically preceded JSPs. This meant that there were vendors and open source projects which had an investment in servlet containers when the JSP specification was being developed. To leverage this investment in technology, JSPs are implemented on top of servlet technology. JSP pages are in fact compiled or converted into servlets, which are then run within the servlet container. In the case of the Tomcat server, both the JSP engine and the servlet container are contained within the same server environment. The JSP 1.1 specification requires a servlet container that implements the Java servlets 2.2 specification; the Tomcat server provides both of these and is the reference implementation for servlets ...