JavaServer Pages, Second Edition

3.9 Summary and Conclusions

Beans are Java's standard component model and integrate well with JSPs. Beans help separate Java code from HTML by providing standard tags that allow the JSP to get data to and from the bean, via the bean's properties. Beans also make writing dynamic pages that use forms easier, by providing easy ways to send form data into beans and get results out. By supporting serialization, beans also help pull changeable data out of pages, which allows a bean to be customized and stored. This customization can tailor a bean for a site or a period of time.

Chapter 10 discusses how to write beans in more detail. In the meantime, the source code for all the beans used in this chapter is included on the CD-ROM for interested readers to explore.

In order to complete the calculator and quiz examples from this chapter, a page must be able to customize itself based on certain criteria. In order to do this, the page will need to use the special JSP tags from the standard library. This is the topic of the next chapter.