Overview of JSP Technology   Benefits of JSP   JSP pages are translated into servlets. So, fundamentally, any task JSP pages can perform could also be accomplished by servlets. However, this underlying equivalence does not mean that servlets and JSP pages are equally appropriate in all scenarios. The issue is not the power of the technology, it is the convenience, productivity, and maintainability of one or the other. After all, anything you can do on a particular computer platform in the Java programming language you could also do in assembly language. But it still matters which you choose.68960

    JSP provides the following benefits over servlets alone:

    1.It is easier to write and maintain the HTML. Your static code is ordinary HTML: no extra backslashes, no double quotes, and no lurking Java syntax.

    2.You can use standard Web-site development tools. Even HTML tools that know nothing about JSP can be used because they simply ignore the JSP tags.

    3. You can pide up your development team. The Java programmers can work on the dynamic code. The Web developers can concentrate on the presentation layer. On large projects, this pision is very important. Depending on the size of your team and the complexity of your project, you can enforce a weaker or stronger separation between the static HTML and the dynamic content.

    Now, this discussion is not to say that you should stop using servlets and use only JSP instead. By no means. Almost all projects will use both. For some requests in your project, you will use servlets. For others, you will use JSP. For still others, you will combine them with the MVC architecture . You want the appropriate tool for the job, and servlets, by themselves, do not complete your toolkit.

    Advantages of JSP Over Competing Technologies

    A number of years ago, Marty was invited to attend a small 20-person industry roundtable discussion on software technology. Sitting in the seat next to Marty was  

James Gosling, inventor of the Java programming language. Sitting several seats away was a high-level manager from a very large software company in Redmond, Washington. During the discussion, the moderator brought up the subject of Jini, which at that time was a new Java technology. The moderator asked the manager what he thought of it, and the manager responded that it was too early to tell, but that it seemed to be an excellent idea. He went on to say that they would keep an eye on it, and if it seemed to be catching on, they would follow his company's usual "embrace and extend" strategy. At this point, Gosling lightheartedly interjected "You mean disgrace and distend."

    Now, the grievance that Gosling was airing was that he felt that this company would take technology from other companies and suborn it for their own purposes. But guess what? The shoe is on the other foot here. The Java community did not invent the idea of designing pages as a mixture of static HTML and dynamic code marked with special tags. For example, Cold Fusion did it years earlier. Even ASP (a product from the very software company of the aforementioned manager) popularized this approach before JSP came along and decided to jump on the bandwagon. In fact, JSP not only adopted the general idea, it even used many of the same special tags as ASP did.

    So, the question becomes: why use JSP instead of one of these other technologies Our first response is that we are not arguing that everyone should. Several of those other technologies are quite good and are reasonable options in some situations. In other situations, however, JSP is clearly better. Here are a few of the reasons.

    Versus .NET and Active Server Pages (ASP)

    .NET is well-designed technology from Microsoft. ASP.NET is the part that directly competes with servlets and JSP. The advantages of JSP are twofold.