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JSP best practices

Follow these tips for reusable and easily maintainable JavaServer Pages

By Dustin Marx, JavaWorld.com, 11/29/01

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The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has some resources related to HTML best practices and validation.

Utilize the JSP exception mechanism

While a thrown exception's stack trace proves extremely useful for developers when debugging their code, it is rarely desirable to share an entire exception stack trace with the software's users. Lengthy stack traces are not aesthetically pleasing and can increase security risks by exposing information that does not need to be released. JSPs allow developers to catch and handle exceptions in the code, resulting in more secure and aesthetically pleasing exception handling. See Resources for details on the mechanics of JSP exception handling.

Exception information is more useful if information besides the stack trace is included. JSPs can use session variables to store information about the current page and current operation being performed. Then, if an exception does occur, the exception page will be called; it will have access to both the thrown exception and the information about the original page that caused the exception. The exception page can utilize underlying Java code, in JavaBeans or EJBs, to store in the database the complete exception information, related session information, and the exception's date and time.

To reduce the unsightly error messages printed to the screen and improve security, the exception page need only print out a simple error message and perhaps an identifying number that allows developers to locate more detailed exception information in the database. For aesthetic and security reasons, I prefer storing most of the exception information in a database or flat file rather than printing it all to the screen. Storing the exception information in a database or flat file also allows the information to be persisted even when a user exits the application. Note that during development you should print full exception information to the screen for regular testing and debugging.

Now start developing JSPs

If abused, many JSP conveniences can lead to unnecessary complexity. This article summarizes some JSP practices that allow developers to take advantage of these conveniences without triggering unnecessary complexity. By following the best practices discussed here, you will increase your software's maintainability and reusability as well as its aesthetic qualities.

Situations might arise where the overhead of some of these recommended JSP practices is not worth the cost, such as in extremely simple applications. However, my experience is that even the simplest applications often evolve into more complex systems. In most cases, the sooner you follow best practices such as these, the better.

About the author

Dustin Marx is a senior software engineer at Raytheon Systems Company in Aurora, Colo. He has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's degree in business administration. He has been writing software for more than 10 years and, for the last five years, has been concentrating on object-oriented software using C++ and Java. Although he typically prefers processing and database-related development over GUI work (especially HTML pages), he has found JavaServer Pages technology to be appealing when the practices recommended in this article are followed.

Read more about Enterprise Java in JavaWorld's Enterprise Java section.

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