Oracle Application Server 10g Web Development (Oracle Press)

JavaServer Pages (JSPs) are an invaluable tool in modern web development. They provide developers with numerous benefits, including:

• Utilization of the Java programming language . Given JSPs use Java, they can be run on any application server that supports Java. Oracle Application Server 10 g supports Java and Java Services such as JSP through the use of containers. Oracle Application Server Containers For J2EE (OC4J), which supports the JSP 1.2 specification, is included with Oracle Application Server 10 g . An additional benefit is the fact that because Java has become ubiquitous, the learning curve for JSPs is often much smaller than those of competing technologies.

• Separation of roles. The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) makes clear distinctions between the types of services that constitute a Java-based web application. The most commonly referred to categories include:

  • Communication Services Handles requests to and from the Web

  • Business Logic Services The development tools and languages for building applications

  • Presentation Services The development tools and languages for building dynamic web pages

    Technologies such as Business Components for Java (BC4J) and Oracle Forms are good for writing, testing, and maintaining your business logic but there are other technologies that are better suited for displaying your applications. Presentation Services deliver dynamic content to client browsers, supporting servlets, business intelligence, PL/SQL Server Pages, JSPs, Perl/CGI scripts, and PHP. You can use Presentation Services to build your presentation layer for your web applications. While Oracle puts these services into a separate group , you can think of them grouped with the Business Logic Services, in that your application logic can reside within these components. It is the authors recommendation, however, that you break your business logic into executable components, which can then be called por invoked by these services.

  • Tag libraries JSPs use tags to allow the insertion of dynamic content, which is invaluable for database-based applications. A tag library, which defines additional tags, can be used to replace sections of code.