JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Using page Directive Scripting Attributes

The page directive has two attributes that may be used when you use scripting elements: language and import:

<%@ page language="java" import="java.util.*" %>

The language attribute specifies the scripting language used in the page. All containers are required to support Java.^[1] java is also the default value for the language attribute, but, for clarity, you may still want to specify it. Some JSP implementations support other languages besides Java and, hence, allow other values for the language attribute. For instance, both JRun (http://www.macromedia.com/) and Resin (http://www.caucho.com/) support JavaScript in addition to Java.

The JSP specification requires that the classes in the java.lang, javax.servlet, javax.servlet.jsp, and the javax.servlet.http packages are available by default to scripting elements when Java is used as the scripting language. If you use classes from packages other than these, they can be imported with the import attribute, to make it possible to use the short class names in the scripting elements.

If you need to import more than one package, you can use multiple page directives with import attributes in the same page or use one with a comma-separated list of import declarations. In other words, this directive:

<%@ page import="java.util.*, com.ora.jsp.util.*" %>

has the same effect as these two directives:

<%@ page import="java.util.* " %>
<%@ page import="com.ora.jsp.util.*" %>

Starting with JSP 2.0, classes without ...