JSP is a server-side language. It’s using simple tag-based codes that embedded into the HTML or XML pages to make it more interactive. By putting this code into your HTML or XML pages, you created a platform independent webpage.

It means no matter which browsers that your visitors use when they visits your website, they would see the exact same layout and contents. This is the biggest differences if you compare it with any HTML or XML webpage that has no JSP embedded codes in it.

By using the JSP web developers and designers could get more creative by combining JSP codes with the HTML layout to create a better user interface. JSP is quite different with other CGI scripts. If the CGI scripts require you to create your entire website in one program, JSP allow you to build the dynamic parts of your website separately. So, you don’t have to stick with the same program that you don’t even understand to operate it to create your entire websites.

If you’re one of the web designer that already tired repeating the process of creating the work that you already done, JSP hosting is the right choice for you. This JSP hosting will be very useful especially if you work on a team.

One of the benefits of JSP is that you don’t have to learn any Java language or program. The Java itself practically attached inside Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, so you could make it easier to insert Java codes into your HTML or XML pages.

Here are some of the tags that being used in the Java codes that you need to know:

- Actions: This is an XML-style tag that you can use to perform any slew of functions
- Declarations: <%!declaration%> Use this to declare methods or variables that you have throughout the page
- Expressions: <%=expression%> Expressions could be used to produce results which could be inserted into output stream
- Directives: <%@directive%> This is the instructions processed that should be done when the page is compiled
- Scriptlets: <%scriptlet%> This is a piece of code that can access any declared variables and execute it
- Hidden Comments: <–comment–> The notes that you put on the page and can’t be seen by client