JavaServer Pages: The Language

As we've mentioned, JSP consists of server-side scripting mixed with static HTML or XML (Extensible Markup Language). These script pages are subsequently translated into Java servlets at the web server. Advanced developers experienced with Java can access the full power of Java through JSP pages. For the beginning or intermediate developer, JSP provides a standard library of tags to easily accomplish most dynamic content operations.

To use a standard library of tags, the server needs to differentiate blocks of JSP from other contents of the page. JSP uses <% to identify the start of a JSP section and %> to identify the end of a JSP section. The JSP web server attempts to interpret JSP tags found between the opening and closing JSP tags. (All our JSP examples are wrapped by the beginning and end JSP script tag.)

Note 

Although all current JSP engines accept only Java, the language creators did not limit JSP to Java. In the future, other scripting languages such as JavaScript or VBScript could be used as well.

JSP tags are case sensitive. For example, if you type <%@ Page %>, instead of <%@ page %>, the JSP server will not recognize your code tag, and the page will throw an exception. Furthermore, some attributes on the tags require case-sensitive values.