Tutorial: Get started with JSP

JSP stands for Java Server Pages and it's part of the J2EE specification. That means with JSP your not using a scripting language, but a real object oriented programming language: Java. These days Java is one of the most used programming languages, popular mainly because of its ease of use.

So why should you be building your websites with JSP instead of ASP or PHP? Well, for one, PHP and ASP aren't really scalable. They're good fun when you want to build a small website, with some dynamic features, but they can't handle larger web-applications. JSP can handle large applications, JSP can handle huge applications. Another great benefit is, that once you've got your website running, JSP code is easier to manage because most of it will be good old Java.

To start working with JSP, you'll need an application server. For application servers I can advice Apache Tomcat (If your planning on building something small, like a personal website with some dynamic features) or JBoss (for the more heavy-load applications). Both are easy to install, I promise (an installation guide would be too much for this article, but both JBoss and Tomcat have great support on their websites). After installation, you should follow the documentation of your application server to find out three things: how to start it, where to put your files and how to visit your site. This is different for all application servers, so I can't really help you on that.

Right, I'm going to assume you've visited the JBoss website, installed the latest JBoss application server on your computer and found out all the basic information needed to use JBoss. So let's make our first simple JSP page. Make an ordinary HTML page, but name it index.jsp. The JSP extension will tell the application server that there is Java code inside. Now add the following code in this HTML page:

<%= "Hello, World" %>

place this in your application server and watch what happens when you look at it in a browser (it shows the text "Hello, World", but you already figured that out, right?).