Earlier this week I was able to attend the JSP 2.0 session and learn about its cool new features. There are so many changes that it certainly warrants the major version number upgrade.

Mark Roth, the "wizard" of JSP, began his presentation with a funny pink brains and pacifiers analogy. The brains and pacifiers represented the different user types. He had a table with brains and pacifiers that amused me immensely. The table showed how the learning curve of JSP 2.0 is lower than JSP 1.2.

One of the cool new features that's available in JSP 2.0 is an integrated expression language. JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.0 introduced the concept of the EL but it was limited to only the JSTL tags. With JSP 2.0 you can use the EL with template text. You even get programmatic access via javax.servlet.jsp.el. This powerful feature has now been truly unleashed.

JSP 2.0 also makes it much easier to write custom tags. You now get simple tag extensions with a simpler tag handler API and you only have to implement one easy doTag() method. Simple.

Another thing that I found really cool is the new concept of tag files. These tag files allow you to quickly write simple tag extensions using only jsp syntax. This really empowers page authors who may not be familiar with java development. Now you only need to just drop a .tag file in /WEB-INF/tags and you're done.

There are many more new features available in JSP 2.0. Download it and give it a whirl.