First introduced in 1997, servlets gave developers the ability to write server-side applications in Java. While servlets were great for Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs and other simple tasks, it soon became evident that producing HTML solely with Java code was cumbersome for all and especially difficult for non-programmers involved in the work.
First introduced in 1997, servlets gave developers the ability to write server-side applications in Java. While servlets were great for Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs and other simple tasks, it soon became evident that producing HTML solely with Java code was cumbersome for all and especially difficult for non-programmers involved in the work.
Two years later, Sun took a step in the right direction with Java Server Pages (JSP), which made it easy to combine static HTML with dynamic HTML created by Java statements. Using JSP, Java code could be embedded in Web pages amid HTML markup, and programmers could create their own custom JSP tags to interact with custom Java objects.
Unfortunately, the ease with which Java code could be placed on a Java Server Page proved to be a misstep, because it encouraged the bad habit of placing mission-critical application code in a web page, where it’s hard to maintain, is insecure, and is easily bungled by anyone editing the HTML around the Java code.
Servlets and JSP reflected progress, but, in retrospect, both technologies seem like baby steps compared to the leap of progress found in the recent release of the JSP Standard Tag Library, or JSTL. JSTL is a set of custom JSP tags and a new data-access language that enable JSP-based web applications to handle presentation without resorting to Java code. JSTL, which requires a Java servlet container supporting Java Servlet 2.3 and JavaServer Pages 1.2, lives at http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/jstl….
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