JavaServer Page

Dynamic web servers The extensions need to be developed in a low-level language such as C or C++. This places the extension development knowledge bar at a fairly high level. A bug in an extension can often bring an entire web server down. This means extensions must be tested thoroughly and the extension developer must be an experienced developer. The overall result is that developing a server API extension is very expensive (in terms of salaries and development time), rendering server API inapplicable for many tasks. Some other extension technique was needed. We ll see in chapter 2 how JSP and its custom tags can be developed with far more ease than a server API extension; namely because they are written in the well known, standard Java language. This fact alone addresses all the weaknesses of an API approach since the Java is fairly high-level, strictly standard, and robust enough that a simple bug won t blow up an entire web server, and JSP greatly simplifies the generation of dynamic content. NOTE We are not saying that the server API is useless. In fact, many interesting problems (e.g., content filtering and redirection in the native web server) can only be solved within the context of the server API. Moreover, most of the extension techniques that we are about to see use the server API to link to the web server. This API is, however, more suited for low-level tasks and too cumbersome and costly to use in developing full-scale web applications. 1.3.3 Server pages techniques The goal of the server pages approach to web development is to support dynamic content without the performance problems of CGI, or the difficulty of using a server API. The most popular server page approaches today are Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), JSP from Sun Microsystems Inc., and an open-source approach called PHP. Server pages development simplifies dynamic web development by allowing programmers to embed bits of program logic directly into their HTML pages. This embedded program logic is written in a simple scripting language (which, depending on what your server supports, could be VBScript, JavaScript, Java, or something else). At runtime, the server interprets this script and returns the results of the script s execution to the client. Let s look at an example of ASP in listing 1.1.

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