Sun Java Studio Creator is a free application from Sun Microsystems that adds a very slick IDE to creating web applications based on JSP and JSF. Some of the broad features include:

• 100% Java Standards-based Visual Development
• Drag-and-Drop User Interface Construction
• Drag-and-Drop Access to Databases and Web Services
• Visual Page Flow Design

If you’d like a deeper look at this product, you can check out their impressive Flash Product Demo/Movie.

Demystifying Apache Struts: A Quick Start Tutorial for Jakarta Struts is a seven part tutorial that explains:

• Installing and configuring Struts?
• A step-by-step guide to set up a simple Struts application
• Overview of the minimum steps required to build a basic Apache Struts application
• Specific examples of how to use each of the most important Struts capabilities
• A walk through of the basic flow of control

Oracle has a nice article that will help you Understand the New Features of JSP 2.0. JSP 2.0 is an upgrade to JSP 1.2 with several new and interesting features that make the life of web application developers and designers easier.

IBM Developer Works has a very nice collection of articles that outline Best Practices in JSP.

The articles focus on introductor skills for JSP programmers and make a nice starting point for those of you who may be beginning or thinking of starting to learn JSP.

With the Google JSP Tag Library, developers and designers can easily incorporate Google queries, search results, cached pages and spelling suggestions into any web site or application.

The author of this tag library suggests the following uses:

• Provide a way to search your web site or mailing list using Google.
• Incorporate targeted Google search results directly into your home page.
• Add Google’s spell-checking to your weblog.

Xephyrus File Upload Tag Library provides an easy way to process files uploaded from a web form within JSP pages. It is a tag library wrapper around the Jakarta Commons FileUpload utility.

This is a tag library wrapper around the Jakarta Commons FileUpload utility.

O’Reilly.com has a good article that outlines Six Cool New JSP and Servlet Features. They are:

1. Using a servlet as a welcome file.
2. Mapping filters to RequestDispatchers.
3. The new ServletRequestListener and
   ServletRequestAttributeListener interfaces.
4. Using Expression Language (EL) code within template text, not just as tag
   attribute values.
5. Writing tag files.
6. Writing Expression Language qualified functions.

Coldtags Suite is a collection of over 100 JSP custom tags. The tags range from calendar display to client-side validation to SOAP and XML parsing.

Really too many tags to list here, but from my experience, the tags are all of top quality and free for use in non-commercial projects. Conact the authors if you would like to use them in commmercial applications.

sitepoint.com has a good Introduction to the Java Standard Tag Library (JSTL).

I recently completed a web application using JSTL, Tomcat and MySQL recently and must admit that it was an awesome experience. Java Server Pages once scared me as the thought of creating servelets seemed overwhelming. Using JSTL makes created J2EE based web apps a very easy task.

From a teaching standpoing, I have taught PHP, ASP and most recently JSP. JSP (using the JSTL) was certainly the easiest to teach. As the language is tag-based, students seem to catch on to the techiques very quickly.