What is JSP?
When shopping for a web host, or perhaps just looking to upgrade your existing hosting setup, you see a lot of checkmarks. One of those green checkmarks you see might be for JSP. So what is JSP? JSP is short for JavaServer Pages.
After Microsoft tried to fill the hole left by complex and inefficient CGI scripts, they solve that problem, and also created a new problem. Microsoft’s solution was Active Server Pages (otherwise known as ASP). The problem with ASP was it limited you to Microsoft platforms and even the littlest mistake would bring your entire web site down.
In response to ASP, Sun Microsystems developed the JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology.
As for a dictionary definition for it, you can think of JSP as a technology that allows a software developer to create HTML, XML or other documents dynamically. JSP allows certain pre-defined actions (and Java code) to the embedded into static content. Think of it as a way to write your web page based around the Java technology.
Another nice perk about JSP, is it uses Java, and the Java technology is not restricted to any server-specific platform.
To sum things up, with JSP, you can create a dynamic web page just by simply putting the corresponding Java code inside of your HTML pages. The code is then executed by the web server, before being returned to the browser.
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Which is great for Java developers, but there was an untapped market that Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe tapped into. You don’t need to be a java developer to do this because you can do this with ColdFusion.
ColdFusion 6 was rebuilt from the ground up with java. ColdFusion has the best of both worlds, java and an existing rapid application development language called ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). Not only can ColdFusion Server serve out CFM pages, but it’s also able to server out JSP pages as well.
CF8 is now available and has made quite the difference with speed increase and new ajax libraries built in.
Adobe has a free developer edition to download.
Very nice read, I did not know anything about JSP. thanks for the insight.