The objective of this course is to give you an understanding of both the architecture of JavaServer Page technology and the syntax of a JavaServer Page. By the end of this course you will know how to deploy and configure an Application Server, the software required for JavaServer Pages, and be able to build a JSP based web application. The workshops that come with this course use JRun 3.0 Application Server and the first workshop covers the installation and configuration of this software.
Prerequisites for this course are HTML and the Java language. JavaServer Pages are written as a mix of HTML and Java and so if you need to be able to build a web application using JavaServer Pages then these prerequisites are essential. If you only need a high level understanding of JavaServer Pages - just the architecture and have an idea of what can be done with the technology then these prerequisites are less essential.
If you wish to study HTML then I recommend the online course at CWRU and for Java the Java Tutorial at Sun is a good place to start.
The recommended text book for this tutorial is "Web Development with JavaServer Pages" by Fields and Kolb published by Manning. This book provides an excellent introduction to JSP technology and covers the JSP syntax in detail. It goes further than this tutorial in the fact that it provides details of more advanced topics such as database access. The chapters discussing architecting JSP projects and the worked examples of common web orientated task such as working with cookies, form validation and rotating banner ads are worth while reading. Click the image for more details.
This course is split into topics with each topic introducing another aspect of JSP. You can take the course all at once or you can split the course over several days with each day covering a new topic. Each topic will take you at most two hours and if you start a new topic on every day then the whole course will last 5 to 6 days.
Some topics have workshops that allow you to practice the subject that the topic introduced. To be able to do these workshops you will need JSP software installed and configured on your machine. Workshop 1 takes you through the steps of installing and configuring JRun 3.0 for use with the remaining workshops. If you already have JSP software then feel free to use what you have.
There are various demonstrations throughout this course that highlight a specific aspect of JSP. When running the demonstration the page will contain the screwdriver icon which when clicked will display the source code for the JSP.
Throughout this course you will come across some words in green. These are key terms or abbreviations that when you move the mouse pointer over the word a definition of that word or abbreviation will appear. For example, JDK. Typically only the first instance of the word will be defined. And all definitions and some more are contained in the glossary.