Chapter 9. JSP Best Practices
| Hans Bergsten |
The
JavaServer Pages (JSP)
specification was developed to simplify the creation and maintenance
of web user interfaces for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
applications. A JSP page is a regular web page with markup elements
(such as HTML or WML), plus additional JSP elements that control the
dynamic parts of the page—for instance, filling a table with
data retrieved from a data source at runtime. JSP pages eliminate the
need to generate the user interface markup elements with
out.println( )
statements in servlets—the approach used in early server-side
Java web applications—and make it easier to split the
development between page authors (user interface
developers) and Java programmers.
The basic idea behind JSP is easy to understand, and it’s easy to start using the technology, but it’s not always obvious how to apply it efficiently, especially for large-scale applications. Because JSP lets you place logic directly in your web pages, it’s also easy to abuse the technology; what might seem like time-saving shortcuts early in a project can easily lead to debugging and maintenance nightmares, poor scalability, and an application that’s hard to extend as new requirements surface. This chapter offers recommendations for how to use JSP effectively and provides solutions to common issues.