Intro

The Sun Microsystems’s Java Server Pages technology allows you to rapidly develop and easily maintain rich, dynamic web pages. As a part of the Java family, JSP enables development of web based applications that are platform independent. The web applications build using JSP technology works with a wide variety of web servers, application servers, browsers and development tools. The logic that generates the content is encapsulated in tags and JavaBeans components and tied together in scriptlets, all of which are executed on the server side. If the core logic is encapsulated in tags and Beans then other individuals, such as web masters and page designers, can edit and work with JSP pages without affecting the generation of the content. Thus the JSP technology separates the user interface from the content generation.

JSP page is simply an HTML web page, which contain additional bits of code that generates dynamic content of the page. JSP technology is a part of java family. It uses a java programming language based scripting language and JSP are compiled into java servelets the first time they are invoked. JSP pages may call JavaBeans, EJB components, RMI objects, DBC objects to perform processing on the server. Example JSP page may contain HTML that display static text and graphics, as well as a method call to JDBC object that access database, when the page is displayed in a user’s browser.

Features of JSP

• JSP technology follows the write once run anywhere rule which is the basic of the java language
  
• JSP uses pure java and takes the advantage of its object oriented nature
  
• JSP uses a combination of tags and scripting to create dynamic web pages
  
• The JSP page uses the components like EJB, JavaBeans which are reusable. This gives the JSP reusability capabilities.
  
• Applications made using JSP technology are easier to maintain

Conclusion

Java server pages and active server pages are similar in many aspects. Both are designed to create the interactive web based applications. To a large extent, both JSP and ASP can create a web page that separates programming logic from the page design. Though there are many similar ways, there are some difference in their structure and design. The major difference that while JSP technology is designed to be platform and server independent, ASP is a Microsoft product that relies primarily on Microsoft technologies.