JSP Processing
Just as a web server needs a servlet container to provide an interface to servlets, the server needs a JSP container to process JSP pages. The JSP container is responsible for intercepting requests for JSP pages. To process all JSP elements in the page, the container first turns the JSP page into a servlet (known as the JSP page implementation class). The conversion is pretty straightforward; all template text is converted to println( ) statements similar to the ones in the handcoded servlet shown in Example 3-1, and all JSP elements are converted to Java code that implements the corresponding dynamic behavior. The container then compiles the servlet class.