JavaServer Pages, Third Edition is completely revised and updated to cover the substantial changes in the 2.0 version of the JSP specification. It also includes detailed coverage of the major revisions to the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) specification. Combining plenty of practical advice with detailed coverage of JSP syntax and features and clear, useful examples, JavaServer Pages, Third Edition demonstrates how to embed server-side Java into Web pages, while also covering important topics such as JavaBeans, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), and JDBC database access.

JavaServer Pages™ (JSP) is a technology for web application development that has received a great deal of attention since it was first announced in 1999. Since then, it has gone through three revisions. This book covers the 2.0 version of the specification. Why is JSP so exciting? One reason is that JSP is Java-based, and Java™ is well suited for enterprise computing. In fact, JSP is a key part of the Java 2™ Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform and can take advantage of the many Java Enterprise™ libraries, such as JDBC™, JNDI™, and Enterprise JavaBeans™.

Another reason is that JSP supports a powerful model for developing web applications that separates presentation from processing. Understanding why this is so important requires a bit of a history lesson. In the early days of the Web, the only tool for developing dynamic web content was the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). CGI outlined how a web server made user input available to a program, as well as how the program provided the web server with dynamically generated content to send back. CGI scripts were typically written in Perl. (In fact, Perl/CGI scripts still drive numerous dynamic web sites.) However, CGI is not an efficient solution. For every request, the web server has to create a new operating-system process, load a Perl interpreter and the Perl script, execute the script, and then dispose of it when it's done. To provide a more efficient solution, various alternatives to CGI have been added to programmers' toolboxes over the last few years: FastCGI, for example, runs each CGI program in an external permanent process (or a pool of processes). In addition, mod_perl for Apache, NSAPI for Netscape, and ISAPI for Microsoft's IIS all run server-side programs in the same process as the web server itself. While these solutions offer better performance and scalability, each one is supported only by a subset of the popular web servers.