| Filled with useful examples and the depth, clarity, and attention to detail that made the first edition so popular with web developers, JavaServer Pages, 2nd Edition is completely revised and updated to cover the substantial changes in the 1.2 version of the JSP specifications, and includes coverage of the new JSTL Tag libraries-an eagerly anticipated standard set of JSP elements for the tasks needed in most JSP applications, as well as thorough coverage of Custom Tag Libraries.
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 two revisions. This book covers the 1.2 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. |