Sams Teach Yourself J2EE™ in 21 Days, Second Edition

JSP Syntax and Structure

Before writing your first JSP, you need to gain an understanding of the syntax and the structure of a JSP.

JSP elements are those parts of the JSP that are translated by the JSP container. Everything else in the JSP is HTML (which is not translated and simply passed to the JSPWriter object); this is often referred to as Template text.

There are two ways of writing a JSP: either using JSP syntax (which resembles but is not XML) or using XML syntax. When a JSP is written using XML syntax it is called a JSP document.

If you are using a JSP 2.0 or later container (available with J2EE 1.4) you can take advantage of an expression language (EL) that makes it much easier to access and manipulate application data within a JSP, ...