J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) technology, the superset of Servlet/Jsp technology, has become an accepted standard for developing enterprise level web applications. The ever growing number of Fortune 500 enterprises using it as the basis for their hosting platforms testifies to its success. The success of servlet/jsp technology can be associated with a number of factors which has made Java a more powerful, open, efficient and easier to use technology than alternative hosting technologies. - (.NET, ASP, PHP, Perl, and Coldfusion).

Although Microsoft's .NET has established itself as a potent web application framework, Java is now entrenched with the mobile phone arena...

Following the Java maxim of 'Write once, run everywhere', you can write your servlets and/or jsp pages and deploy on any machine which has a JVM machine ported to it, this includes most of the Un*x family of operating sytems, all modern Macs and of course Windows. This provides true platform neutrality as opposed to rival technologies which bind you tightly to an operating system - .NET normally requires that you run a Microsoft operating system for your hosting platform. Apart from the obvious cost implications means you are also totally dependent on Microsoft's product development for your hosting - the long awaited Vista.

Java has become increasingly open with many of the large projects (Tomcat/JBoss) developed under an open source licence which means they are free to use and the source code is downloadable. The source code for the libraries which ship with the Sun Microsystems JVM is also freely available, and Java itself may itself be made open source. The development of Java including extensions continues to be open, where extensions to the core API are developed by community process (JCR) which are open to interested parties.

Servlets and jsps (jsps are compiled into servlets by the servlet container) run in a sandbox which eliminates any danger of buggy servlets or compromised servlets from endangering the health of your web site. Techniques used by hackers such as stack overflows which have compromised other technologies (such as Microsoft's IIS and .NET) are virtually unknown.

JVMs are now shipping with JIT (Just In Time) technology which has made jsp/servlet technology even faster. As servlets remain in memory and use native threads - unlike some CGI technologies which spawn a new process for every request - once loaded servlets remain in memory and are 'recycled' to handle requests. Sun Microsystem's latest JVM release (1.5) brings further performance boosts.

Servlets handle all the aspects of session management for you, letting you concentrate on the implementation of the real business logic so implementing a shopping cart cannot be easier. Frameworks such as Struts, Spring and JSF (Java Server Faces) combined with ORM (Object relational Mapping) frameworks such as Hibernate now make it even easier to produce sites with highly evolved architectural foundations. Designed from the outset for code reuse, the huge number of open source Java projects means libraries for virtually every conceivable requirement are catered for from charting to scheduling.

Development using JSP pages is very similar to other scripting technologoies like ASP and PHP which give the opportunity to embed business logic into html pages. Jsps are automatically compiled into servlets. The number of open source - free - IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans) with integrated servlet containers now makes development even easier.

The tag-lib technology allows you to define custom tags which you can embed into your HTML to effortlessly introduce logic into a page. Non-programmers who understand HTML can embed 'tags' into pages without needing to understand the underlying technical details. The arrival of Java Server Faces with the concept of renderers allow a developer to effortlessly plug in custom renderers to change the appearance of HTML components.

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