How to template with JSP files

Question

I'm learning JSP and have a good working knowledge of PHP and MVC frameworks.

I would like to know how I can break down JSP files so that I can have a file for the header, with the doctype/meta/references stuff, a file for the footer with the closing body and html tags etc, and a file for the menu (these sections will be the same on every page so I don't want to duplicate them, otherwise updating will take ages).

In PHP I would just include the file for each.

How does this work for JSP, and is there a best practise?

Answer 1

Doing this stuff manually is messy. Try Apache Tiles or Sitemesh .

Answer 2

I agree with what Matt said in his comment, but if you really want to do included JSP files using

<jsp:include page="<yourfile>"/> 

works about how you'd expect, where yourfile is either an actual path to a specific file, or a file in the same directory.