The Anatomy of a JSP Page

A JSP page is simply a regular web page with JSP elements for generating the parts that differ for each request, as shown in Figure

Everything in the page that isn't a JSP element is called template text. Template text can be any text: HTML, WML, XML, or even plain text. Since HTML is by far the most common web page language in use today, most of the descriptions and examples in this book use HTML, but keep in mind that JSP has no dependency on HTML; it can be used with any markup language. Template text is always passed straight through to the browser.

When a JSP page request is processed, the template text and dynamic content generated by the JSP elements are merged, and the result is sent as the response to the browser.