"Sun Microsystems Inc., in an effort to popularize its JSP scripting language, has donated code for a JSP and Java Servlet engine to the Apache Group, which the group has released as an Apache product called Tomcat. JSP is a relatively new technology and still has clear market immaturities in terms of tools, support resources and available talent."

"However, because JSP is based on Java (and can do nearly anything Java can do, thus opening up a huge API set and selection of class libraries), and because a just-emerging JSP extension called tag libraries lets JSP mimic ColdFusion's tag-style API, we think JSP is going to be a core Web scripting language in a few years. There is also more—and more varied—vendor support for JSP among high-end application server products (which are almost universally based on Java) than for any other scripting technology, giving JSP developers an easy path to greater scalability and fault tolerance."

"On the server side, we tested Beta 5 of the Apache Group's free Tomcat 3.2. On a test Linux server, Tomcat had a speed of about 13 pages per second. Unfortunately, Tomcat has very rudimentary performance monitoring and administration tools... Development tools are also generally lacking in the JSP space, although Sun's Forte for Java 1.0 Community Edition is a free and quite capable JSP development environment."

"For enterprise development, we believe that JSP, despite its newness, is the right option because of its use of Java and the many application server product options that support JSP."

Complete Story

Related Stories:
IDM: The Problems with JSP (JavaServer Pages)(Jun 07, 2000)
BW: Informix Showcasing Java-Based Solutions that Scale from the Smallest Devices to Enterprise Class Systems at JavaOne(Jun 06, 2000)
JavaBoutique: Java Servlets Part 4: Handling Form Data(Jun 05, 2000)