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1. Introduction

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1.1 Servlets and JSP

The Servlet and the JSP standard is maintained by SUN and is part of their J2EE framework. A Servlet engine provides the runtime environment for Servlets, components, which are similar to Applets but run on the server side. The Servlet container as an implementation of the Servlet API provides the interface between a single Servlet and the Servlet engine or the web server. The current Servlet API version is 2.2, version 2.3 is available as final draft.

A JSP (Java Server Page) is a server side scripting document, similar to ASP, which contains beside HTML Java source code within special JSP tags as

The language inside a JSP is Java, however the standard is open to use other languages for JSP scripting. A JSP page is interpreted by a JSP compiler before it can be executed by the web server. The compilation will first generate the Java source code of a Servlet. This source is compiled with the normal Java compiler and the Servlet class file could be executed like any other servlet by the Servlet Engine.

There're powerfull implementations of Servlets and JSP like Tomcat or ServletExec. A useful book about Servlets and JSP's is 'Core Servlets and Java Server Pages' by Marty Hall (ISBN: 0130893404).

1.2 Pi3Web Roadmap

Pi3Web 2.0 provides a Servlet Engine plugin, which implements the Servlet API 2.1. A JSP 1.1 compliant JSP parser is under development and will be available soon. The Servlet engine is available on Win32 as an add on to the Pi3Web 2.0beta package. Linux support will be part of the Pi3Web 2.0 release.

To support the latest Servlet and JSP API versions is planned. But it depends a bit on development support, because the API's are complicated and I currently do all this stuff more or less alone.


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