JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Chapter 18. Web Application Models

Part II of this book describes how you can create many different types of applications using only JSP pages with generic components—JSTL actions, custom actions and beans—to access databases, present content in different languages, protect pages, and so forth—all without knowing much about Java programming. This approach works fine for many types of web applications, such as employee registers, product catalogs, and conference room reservation systems. But for applications with complicated schemas, intricate business rules, and tricky control flows, the generic components just don’t cut it, and you suddenly find that you need a more powerful way to handle the request processing and the business logic.

As I mentioned in Chapter 3, JSP can be combined with other Java technologies such as servlets and EJB in more complex applications. In this chapter, we look at how JSP fits into this larger picture. After the brief description of the most common application models in this chapter, Chapter 19 describes the combination of servlets and JSP in detail.

The material presented in this part of the book is geared towards Java programmers. If you’re not a programmer, you may still want to browse through this part to get a feel for the possibilities, but don’t expect to understand everything. To really appreciate the techniques described in this part of the book, you should have experience with Java programming in general. Familiarity with Java servlets also ...