j2ee: JSP/Servlet Differences [11/20]

Servlets

• Precompiled
• Class files placed in doc root/WEB-INF/classes

JSPs

• Compiled either at startup or at first invocation by servlet engine
• JSP compiler - converts JSP to Java code
• Java compiler - compiles Java code to byte code
• Uses the same classpath as the webapp (so put your bean and utility classes in doc root/WEB-INF/classes

Note that you can run all the JSP steps manually outside of the servlet container if you wish. This can be helpful when doing debugging of some JSP problems, but most likely you'll want to just use the Tomcat defaults which are set up for development.