JSP in Action

Abstract

In Chapter 2, you learned that there are three types of JSP elements: scripting, directives, and actions. I described the first two types directly in Chapter 2, and the time has come to look at JSP actions. Actions, like scriptlets, are processed when a page is requested. In this chapter, you will learn how to use JSP standard actions, how to create actions of your own design, and how to use some of the actions contained in the JSP Standard Tag Library. Besides small specific examples, you will also learn the role of actions in the eshop application that I introduced in the previous chapter. Actions can do everything that scripting elements can do, as you will see at the end of the next chapter, when I will tell you how to write JSP code without any scripting element at all.