JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Implicit JSP Scripting Objects

Scripting elements can use predefined variables that the container assigns as references to implicit objects (Table 16-1) to access request and application data. These objects are instances of classes defined by the servlet and JSP specifications. Appendix D contains complete descriptions of all methods for each class, and they are briefly introduced here and used in a number of examples in this chapter.

Table 16-1. Implicit JSP objects

Variable name	Java type
application	javax.servlet.ServletContext
config	javax.servlet.ServletConfig
exception	java.lang.Throwable
out	javax.servlet.jsp.JspWriter
page	java.lang.Object
pageContext	javax.servlet.jsp.PageContext
request	javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest
response	javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse
session	javax.servlet.http.HttpSession

These objects provide access to the same information (and more) as the implicit variables you can use in EL expressions, but it’s not a one-to-one match:

pageContext

The pageContext variable contains a reference to an instance of the class named javax.servlet.jsp.PageContext. It provides methods for accessing references to all the other objects and attributes for holding data that is shared between components in the same page. It’s the same object that you can access with the ${pageContext} EL expression. Attribute values for this object represent the page scope; they are the same objects as are available to the EL world as a Map represented by ...