OK - here's a very basic post about JSP's etc...
Essentially - you need a "Servlet engine" - a lot of people use Tomcat (it's free) others around are things like Websphere, JBoss, Weblogic - but they're a bit more heavy duty than you'll need...
So - how does it all hang together... essentially - you need to set it up with the main building blocks are detailed in this...
http://j-integra.intrinsyc.com/support/ ... nment.html
Tomcat has tutorials too...
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/ssl-howto.html
To start an application within tomcat you need a few necessary things... Here's a couple of brief tutorials...
http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomc ... nment.html
http://dn.codegear.com/article/22057
I'd suggest downloading "Eclipse Europa" - and getting the tomcat plugin - this allows you to stop and start you Tomcat from within your IDE!!
So - what happens under the hood?
There are a few ways of doing stuff but the main 2 are thus.
a) Straight jsp's. - These are JSP files (similar to HTML but with extra stuff in) and you load them directly - and they get parsed by the servlet engine into HTML.
b) Servlets - These are referenced in web.xml under specific paths - and equate to a Java Class that enables you to capture the Server requests - and then output direct - or to a specific JSP(s).
Note that
a) JSP's can be included in other JSP's (So for instance - create one "wrapper" JSP - then you can plugin smaller generic bits and pieces.
b) JSP's can contain actual Java code - but to output it to the HTML - you need to stringify it.
c) AJAX is your friend!
C.
