JSP Technology -- Friend or Foe?

By Brett McLaughlin
2003-03-07

The premise

Today, a decade beyond those fledgling Windows applications, we are still dealing with this huge shift in the presentation paradigm. The woeful Visual Basic and C programmers who remain now find themselves working either on back-end systems or Windows-only applications, or they have added a Web-capable language such as the Java language to their toolbox. An application that doesn't support at least three of four ML-isms -- such as HTML, XML, and WML -- is considered shabby, if not an outright failure. And, of course, that means we all care very deeply about the ability to easily develop a Web presentation layer.

As it turns out, using the new Internet, and all the languages we have at our disposal -- Java, C, Perl, Pascal, and Ada, among others -- hasn't been as easy as we might have hoped. A number of issues creep up when it comes to taking the programming languages everyone used for back-end systems and leveraging them to generate markup language suitable for a client. With the arrival of more options on the browser (DHTML and JavaScript coding, for example), the increase in graphic artist talent in the Web domain, and tools that could create complex interfaces using standard HTML, the demand for fancy user interfaces has grown faster than our ability to develop these front ends to our applications. And this has given rise to presentation technology.

Presentation technology was designed to perform a single task: convert content, namely data without display details, into presentation -- meaning the various user interfaces you see on your phone, PalmPilot, or Web browser. What are the problems that these presentation technologies claimed to solve? Let's take a look.

Tutorial Pages:
» A critical look at JavaServer Pages servlets as a viable presentation technology
» A bit of history
» The premise
» Segregation vs. integration
» Work vs. rework
» The promise of JSP technology
» Content vs. presentation
» Code vs. markup
» Designer vs. developer
» The problems
» Portability vs. language lock-in
» Mingling vs. independence
» Blurring the line between content and presentation
» Single-processing vs. multi-tasking
» HTML vs. XML
» Summary
» Resources

First published by IBM developerWorks

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