The History of JSP
Erik tipped me off that the JSP 2.0 Proposed Final Draft 2 was released. Too bad they don't show a diff of what changed between Draft 1 and Draft 2, or do they? Let me know if you know of such a feature. I did, however, find a little history on Java Server Pages that might be of interest. This excerpt below is from the PDF.
Historical Note
The following individuals were pioneers who did ground-breaking work on the
Java platform areas related to this specification. James Gosling’s work on a Web
Server in Java in 1994/1995 became the foundation for servlets. A larger project
emerged in 1996 with Pavani Diwanji as lead engineer and with many other key
members listed below. From this project came Sun’s Java Web Server product.
Things started to move quickly in 1999. The servlet expert group, with James
Davidson as lead, delivered the Servlet 2.1 specification in January and the
Servlet 2.2 specification in December, while the JSP group, with Larry Cable and
Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart as leads, delivered JSP 1.0 in June and JSP 1.1 in
December.
The year 2000 saw a lot of activity, with many implementations of containers,
tools, books, and training that target JSP 1.1, Servlet 2.2, and the Java 2 Platform,
Enterprise Edition. Tag libraries were an area of intense development, as were
varying approaches to organizing all these features together. The adoption of JSP
technology has continued in the year 2001, with many talks at the "Web, Services
and beyond" track at JavaOne being dedicated to the technology.
The JSP 1.2 specification went final in 2001. JSP 1.2 provided a number of
fine-tunings of the spec. It also added the ability for validating JSP pages through
the XML views of a JSP page. JSP 1.2 also introduced a normative XML syntax
for JSP pages, but its adoption was handicaped by several specification
shortcomings.
JSP 2.0 is a major revision of the JSP language. Key new features include a
simple Expression Language, tag files, substantial simplifications for writing tag
handlers in Java and the notion of JSP fragments. JSP 2.0 also includes a revision
of the XML syntax that addresses most of the problems in JSP 1.2.
Tracking the industry in a printed document is at best difficult; the industry
pages at the web site at http://java.sun.com/products/jsp do a better job.