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JavaServer Pages Documents

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JavaServer Pages Documents

JavaServer Pages Documents
A JSP document is a JSP page written in XML syntax as opposed to the standard syntax
described in
Chapter 5, "JavaServer Pages Technology."
Because it is written in XML syntax, a
JSP document is also an XML document and therefore gives you all the benefits offered by the
XML standard:
You can author a JSP document using one of the many XML-aware tools on the market,
enabling you to ensure that your JSP document is well-formed XML.
You can validate the JSP document against a document type definition (DTD).
You can nest and scope namespaces within a JSP document.
You can use a JSP document for data interchange between web applications and as part of a
compile-time XML pipeline.
In addition to these benefits, the XML syntax gives the JSP page author less complexity and
more flexibility. For example, a page author can use any XML document as a JSP document.
Also, elements in XML syntax can be used in JSP pages written in standard syntax, allowing a
gradual transition from JSP pages to JSP documents.
This chapter gives you details on the benefits of JSP documents and uses a simple example to
show you how easy it is to create a JSP document.
You can also write tag files in XML syntax. This chapter covers only JSP documents. Writing tag
files in XML syntax will be addressed in a future release of the tutorial.
The Example JSP Document
This chapter uses the Duke's Bookstore application, version bookstore5, and the books
application to demonstrate how to write JSP pages in XML syntax. The JSP pages of the
bookstore5
application use the JSTL XML tags (see
"XML Tag Library" on page 211
) to
manipulate the book data from an XML stream. The books application contains the JSP
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