developerWorks: JSP Best Practices: Intro to Taglibs

“In the last installment of JSP best practices, you learned a
scriptlet-based technique for adding last-modification time stamps
to your JavaServer Pages (JSP) files. Unfortunately, scriptlets
introduce more long-term complexity to your pages than they offer
in terms of short-term benefit. They interweave all sorts of HTML
with Java code, which makes debugging and authoring tricky. They
aren’t reusable, which often leads developers to cut-and-paste
between JSP pages, which in turn leads to multiple versions of the
same piece of code. And they make error reporting difficult, since
JSP pages have no clean-cut way to spit out script errors.

“So this time we’ll devise a better solution. In this
installment, you’ll learn the basics of converting a scriptlet to a
custom tag and setting it up for use in your JSP development
projects…”

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