As said before, Java is great for all kinds of development. For web applications it also comes with a suite of powerful extensions to make your work easier. All this is part of J2EE.

Web container

Everything is running inside a web-container. This makes it possible to give very easy access to session/application/page/request scopes, since they are simply objects you can pass around inside the application in the JVM.

Servlets

Equivalent to the CGI applications, except without the hazzle of writing your own request parsers and session/application scope handling.

JSP pages

Avoiding <% %> 'scriplets' in JSP.

JSP pages are usually tedious and boring to write. You need to write many taglibs to get rid of the ugly sniplets.

This is where JSTL comes to the rescue.

IBM developerworks primer to JSTL: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jstl0211.html

You can also read some more about JSTL on the official site at Sun: http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/jstl/

And download the Jakarta implementation at Apaches website: http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/index.html

Login/authentication of users

On tomcat you can use the JDBCRealm or DataSourceRealm if you already have a datasource configured.

OnJava got a good article on J2EE form based authentication: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/06/12/form.html

Java IDE

I use JDEE, an excellent Java IDE for Emacs. It makes your Emacs editor equal any of the better IDEs like IDEA/Intellij and the like.

See an article about it here: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-emacs/?n-j-5241

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