Preface
On a historical timeline, the saga of Java as a server-side programmer’s tool of choice began in early 1997 when Sun Microsystems released the “Java™ Web Server” beta and Java Servlet Developers Kit.[1] Servlets are a type of Java class that executes on a server. Servlets dynamically handle networked requests and responses, mostly using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). In June 1999, Sun introduced JavaServer Pages (JSPs), which intermingled Java code with JavaScript and HTML template text.
JSPs, as they are now evolving (with JSP Version 2.0), are designed to encapsulate domain logic in standard and custom tags, and separate this domain layer from the JSP component’s presentation logic. The latter concept means “the stuff that people see” when they interact with a web application, such as HTML-related screen widgets. Ideally, a JSP uses tags to interact with databases and encapsulate domain rules, and static or dynamically generated template text, such as XML or XHTML, to create the visual page for the user.
During the late 1990s, I was a freelance, backend web developer using a number of different languages. When server-side Java appeared on the scene, I greeted the news with as much relief as joy. Designed from the bottom up as object-oriented and modular, Java represented a reassuring alternative to the ad hoc, ill-designed, albeit well-intentioned masses of web-related code I would often encounter when an organization brought me into the midst of a project.
Not only ...