JSP and Servlet Overview
Objectives
No formal objectives are covered in this chapter. It serves as background material for subsequent chapters.
Outline
- Introduction
- The Servlet Story
- Servlet and JSP History
- Web Servers and Servlet Containers
- JSP
- Chapter Summary
- Review Questions
- Answers to Review Questions
Introduction
This chapter helps you to prepare for the exam by providing an overview of JSP and servlet technologies. It does not directly address any of the objectives listed by Sun. It is general in scope, leaving the technical details to subsequent chapters. To pass the exam, you have to go deeper than just learning syntax. Memorizing without hands-on practice won't work. There are times when it helps to study how Sun designed its classes. Likewise, there are several places throughout the book where I offer a snippet from Tomcat's (or another open source container's) implementation and walk through its source code. You'll discover first-hand how a servlet container works. This chapter also helps you understand the market forces that shaped Java in general and servlets in particular. It also discusses where JSPs fit in the server-side pantheon of scripting technologies. Why even have JSP, since servlets are the real thing? The overview below will answer this question and others, answers that will demystify important issues.