Chapter 1. Introduction
Since JavaServer Pages were introduced in June 1999, they have taken the world by storm! Dozens of products are devoted to JSPs, and hundreds of companies are using JSPs to build their Web sites and corporate intranets. The friendly .jsp extension can be seen all over the Web.
The most significant of the many good reasons for this is that it is amazingly easy to develop sophisticated Web sites with JSPs. Anyone who can write HTML can quickly create rich, dynamic, and responsive Web sites that enable users to get the most out of their online time. Through a mechanism called JavaBeans, JSPs have made it possible for large teams or individuals working on complex projects to divide the work in such a way as to make each piece simple and manageable, without sacrificing any power. JSPs also provide a great deal of flexibility when generating HTML, through the ability to create HTML-like custom tags.
In addition to this fundamental ease of development, high-quality JSP tools are readily available and easy to use. Developers do not need to buy expensive software or commit to a particular operating system in order to use JSPs. The CD-ROM accompanying this book contains everything a JSP author needs to get started, and the tools are powerful enough to serve even a midsized Web site without problems. These free, open-source tools are stable and secure and run on nearly every platform. Of course, high-quality commercial JSP tools are available as well, suitable for serving even the most complex and high-traffic Web sites.
Although JSPs have been useful and powerful since the beginning, this is an especially exciting time to be a JSP developer. The recently released version 2.0 of the JSP specification provides even more features that simplify the process of creating Web sites. In addition, a standard tag library that provides many JSP tags that solve a wide range of common problems has been released. Finally, in the time since they were released, a number of best practices for using JSPs have emerged.
This book covers all the topics: the basic powerful features of the JSP specification, the improvements introduced with version 2.0, as well as the new standard tag library and all the things it does. In addition, this book discusses how best to use these tools, based on real-world experiences.
However, before we get into all the fun, let's take a look back at how the Web has evolved. This will highlight the kinds of problems that Web authors have faced since the beginning. Once this is understood, it will be clear how JSPs solve these problems and make page creation so easy.
 | 
