Java™ Application Development on Linux®

Chapter 19. JSP: Servlets Turned Inside Out

In our last chapter, the BudgetPro servlet example spent a lot of code generating the HTML output for the servlet to send back to the browser. If you want to change the HTML for any page (for example, add a background color), you would have to modify the Java code (obviously)—but you’re not really wanting to modify the logic of the servlet, you only want to tweak its output. The HTML that a servlet generates can be scattered among output statements, string concatenations, classes, and method calls. Servlets, we might say, bury the HTML deep inside the code. We’re now going to take a look at JavaServer Pages (JSP) which do the opposite—they expose the HTML and hide the code down inside.

This technique ...