Which Technology is best, servlets or JSP?

[Swetlano]

Hi,

Can Anyone Suggest which of the Two technology i.e Servlet or JSP is best when I wanted to upload my pages on the Web, Even though both the technology serves the same purpose on the web, but I have intuition that there will be some points which makes them different from each other, so please help me in understanding the difference between both.

Regards,

[pancham]

Servlets tend to be better at providing validation for HTTP requests, interpreting the request parameters and directing the outcome of the interaction. JSP are a good way of providing fairly static, template-style character output for Web applications that include some programming logic.

[PARRISH]

JSPs are compiled to servlets, effectively allowing you to produce a servlet by just writing the HTML page, without knowing Java. Of course, in practice, to get anything serious done, you need to use some server-side code in there...

If you write servlets, you need to know Java to write the servlet body, and HTML to write the output.

The real advantage of JSP is the use of special tags that allow you to call Java beans directly, and the ability to produce your own custom tags (in Java) to do stuff that you can't do with a single call to a Java bean (e.g. inserting a list of items into the HTML, which needs a loop construct).

The idea of JSP is that a development house can put a team of specialists onto developing their web applications. A HTML web page writer/designer can write the JSP without knowing Java, using beans and custom tags written by Java experts.

Unfortunately, custom tags are a bit tedious to produce, and for very simple stuff, like simple loops, or stuff that's unlikely to get re-used, they can seem like overkill.

So JSP allows you to put real Java directly into the HTML inside special tags.

All this Java code will be executed before the HTML is sent to the client, and is generally used to modify the HTML page.

Ironically, individuals producing JSP applications on their own often end up with a JSP containing HTML, JavaScript, and Java all in the one file, which can be a little confusing, especially with all the JSP tags scattered around!

[Ackley]

Servlets and Java Server Pages are complementary APIs, both providing a means for generating dynamic Web content,The advantage of Java Server Pages is that they are document-centric. Servlets, on the other hand, look and act like programs. A Java Server Page can contain Java program fragments that instantiate and execute Java classes, but these occur inside an HTML template file and are primarily used to generate dynamic content.