Programming Tutorials

Getting Started with JSP

By: Emiley J. in JSP Tutorials on 2007-01-06  

It is easy to find tutorials and articles on JSP on the web. But most of them take it for granted that you already have the environment for developing JSPs. So it is quite common for a beginner to get confused about the various tools, APIs, or servers that are required to get started with programming in JSP. If you are one of those poor guys then you have reached the right page. For the rest of you who have already setup the environment for JSP programming already, just skip this page.

As with any other Java technology, the first obvious tool you need is of course the JDK. If you do not have any JDK installed you can start by downloading and installing JDK.  Unlike any other Java program which can run on a JRE (Java runtime environment) a JSP page needs a JSP container to run

Now, a JSP container is nothing but a web server such as Apache or Tomcat that supports JSP hosting. So you will need to download and install Tomcat. Other servers that supports JSP hosting are BEA weblogic, IBM's Websphere or SUN's Sun Java Application server. While all these servers require a licence before you can use, tomcat is free. Tomcat has evolved to be a very stable and open source server and is widely in use in many commercial applications. So for all your development as well as hosting your JSP applications you can use Tomcat. 

Once you have these two, the next step is to get an IDE for Java development. There are many quality IDE such as Codewarrior, JBuilder, Borland etc. There are also a few free development tools such as the Sun Java Studio or the Net beans.  

So you should have any combination of the above three tools for JSP programming and JSP hosting. An ideal total open source free combination will be JDK, Tomcat and Netbeans. Once you have installed these three you are ready to learn the fundamentals of JSP and start coding and testing.