Tag: jsp

Is JSP an unsupported deprecated part of JEE ?

Recently, someone claimed that Java Server Pages (JSP) is an “unsupported”, kind of “deprecated” technology and that Java Server Faces (JSF) is the superior current standard.

I responded that JSP is a solid base standard, not deprecated, just not much advertised anymore. In combination with JSTL core logic tags it is still a reasonably powerful option, suitable for straightforward request-oriented web applications.

For example, JSP tag files (pure JSP based tags, no Java coding required) are a great templating feature for easy view structure reuse that many Java web developers don’t even know about because it was only added in JSP 2.0 – as part of JEE 1.4, when newly released JSF was getting all the hype.

JSP is “stable” in the sense that no significant features have been added in recent years. It is hard to find information on what was actually new in JSP 2.3 versus JSP 2.2. Some might say that it is borderline unmaintained because of this lack of changes. Others might just like it as is.

I think JSP is for web applications sort of what the JDBC API is for persistence, whereas JSF is sort of what the JPA standard is: More elaborate, higher-level features, multiple implementations of the standard by different vendors, added (sometimes nerve-wracking) complexity.

On the other hand, the JEE documentation side of things looks pretty bad for JSP (and ironically also for JDBC):

The JEE 5 tutorial still had a full long chapter about all aspects of JSP.

The JEE 6 and JEE 7 tutorials don’t have those chapters anymore and mention JSP only in passing. The documentation focus is clearly on JSF.

The omission of JSP from those JEE tutorials lead some folks on stackoverflow to ask “Where’s the official JSP tutorial” with some interesting answers.

Regarding non-“deprecation” of JSP, please note that the JEE 7 technologies page clearly lists JSP 2.3 as part of the JEE standard.

The reference documentation for JSP 2.3 is the detailed spec of JSR 245, version 2.3, maintenance release 2, available as PDF from the JSP site.

The JSTL 1.2 spec is also available as PDF from its JCP page.

Side note: Maven Central has a javax.servlet.jsp-api artifact, with most recent version strangely marked as 2.3.2-b01, as if it was a “beta” version.

So in conclusion: Certainly there is no buzz around JSP, rather complete silence. You can call that silence a symptom of death or see it as a sign that there is no need or interest to change this still widely used technology anymore.

HTML / JSP / Servlets / JavaMail / Oracle / CSV / Excel: UTF-8 to Unicode them all

Recently I wrote a web app that

  • Lets user enter a greeting message with subject and body
  • Sends an HTML email (“ecard”) to recipients
  • Stores info about sent messages in Oracle
  • Reports on recently sent messages on an admin page (HTML table)
  • Provides the report as downloadable CSV files (often opened in M$ Excel)
  • Provides an RSS feed about recently sent messages

One goal was to allow any Unicode characters for subject and body text and make sure that web form, servlets, JSP pages, emails, database records and CSV files all support that (no garbled characters anywhere, no data loss through charset conversions).

So here is what I did:

JSP and HTML pages

At the top of the JSP pages:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" %>

In every HTML and JSP page, within the <head> section:

    <meta charset="UTF-8"/>

Servlet filter

In WEB-INF/web.xml:

    <filter>
        <filter-name>UTF8Filter</filter-name>
        <filter-class>net.doepner.servlet.Utf8Filter</filter-class>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>UTF8Filter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

In net/doepner/servlet/Utf8Filter.java:

package net.doepner.servlet;

import javax.servlet.Filter;
import javax.servlet.FilterChain;
import javax.servlet.FilterConfig;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.ServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.ServletResponse;
import java.io.IOException;

/**
 * Makes sure that we use UTF-8 for all requests and response
 */
public class Utf8Filter implements Filter {

    @Override
    public void init(FilterConfig fc) throws ServletException {
        // nothing to do
    }

    @Override
    public final void doFilter(ServletRequest request,
                               ServletResponse response,
                               FilterChain chain)
            throws IOException, ServletException {
        request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        chain.doFilter(request, response);
    }

    @Override
    public void destroy() {
        // nothing to do
    }
}

Sending Email

In the code that sends the email (using javax.mail API):

        final MimeBodyPart htmlPart = new MimeBodyPart();
        htmlPart.setContent(template.getHtml(msg), "text/html;charset=utf-8");

        final Multipart multiPart = new MimeMultipart("alternative");
        multiPart.addBodyPart(htmlPart);

        final MimeMessage email =
                new MimeMessage(Session.getDefaultInstance(properties));

        // setting the sender and recipient is omitted here for brevity

        email.setSubject(msg.getSubject(), "UTF-8");
        email.setContent(multiPart);

        Transport.send(email);

Oracle database

For Unicode support in Oracle, make sure that

  1. Use NLS_CHARACTERSET = AL32UTF8 and regular VARCHAR2 columns
  2. Or use NVARCHAR2 column types.

I used approach A. I haven’t actually tried approach B myself.

Here is a useful query to see current charset settings:

SELECT * FROM nls_database_parameters nls 
         WHERE nls.parameter LIKE '%CHAR%SET%';

CSV generation

See my earlier blog post about CSV generation in a Servlet using my CsvWriter utility class.

The important bits are:

private static final char BYTE_ORDER_MARK = (char) 0xfeff;

Put that byte sequence (the so-called “BOM“) at the very beginning of the response content. Some applications (like M$ Excel) will otherwise not detect the UTF-8 encoding correctly.

Do this on the writer object from the getWriter() method on the servlet response:

// The BOM is required so that Excel will recognize UTF-8
// characters properly, i.e. all non-ASCII letters, etc.
writer.print(BYTE_ORDER_MARK);

RSS feed

I generate the RSS feed with an JSP page. Just make sure you have this on the top of the page:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<%@ page contentType="text/xml;charset=UTF-8" %>