JSP web hosting
There are various kinds of hosting such as ASP.net hosting, JSP hosting, PHP hosting etc; JSP hosting is one of the affordable options, and presents certain advantages over the other types – here’s an insight.
What is JSP Hosting
JSP, developed by Sun Microsystems, stands for Java Server Pages, a server-side technology that makes use of Java codes in static HTML pages to render dynamic results. Hence, JSP hosting must support all kinds of Java Server, and associated technologies so that your web pages may run properly.
Things to Consider
- Support for Latest Technology: There are several other latest technologies similar to JSP, which render dynamic web pages; these include Cold Fusion from Adobe Systems, Chili!Soft ASP for Unix platform, and Microsoft FrontPage for Windows. So, you need to pick JSP hosting provider that supports all these technologies.
- Security: Secondly, security plays another crucial role. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you get access to a secure server to transmit data in encrypted formats, in order to prevent unauthorized access.
- JSP for Ecommerce Sites: The importance of security rises to extremely high levels if you’re planning to host any ecommerce web apps, or associate credit card payment gateways, and other similar applications. Moreover, if you’re running an ecommerce store, you may also require other resources like shopping cart integration, support for Google checkout, and other value added services. However, very few web hosting vendors offer these facilities, so you may have to do a good deal of research to find the right choice.
- Pricing: Quite obviously, you’d not want to shred off big bucks unnecessarily when there are cheaper service providers in the market. However, the reduction in price MUST NOT come at the price of quality, uptime, or value added services. Remember, if you’ve to pay extra for MySQL databases, email IDs, or other such miscellaneous services, then it makes no sense to pick a cheaper hosting package that offers you only web hosting services.
JSP hosting presents the web designers with plethora of Java hosting options ranging from flexibility to handle Java Server Pages effortlessly, down to integrating third party apps. However, it is noteworthy to discuss that ASP and JSP are quite similar in many ways; we’ll discuss about this in the subsequent section in detail.
The next advantage is that JPS works for users of Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and most of the flavors of operating system, and allows you to publish web pages effortlessly. More so, you can create these dynamic pages on the server directly, and even static pages with selected dynamic sections; this improving coding efficiency as opposed to web pages with lot of redundant portion of code. Furthermore, you don’t need to be a Java coding freak necessarily to take advantage of JSP hosting, since creating dynamic web pages with JSP is lot easier than using IDEs, and Java codes.
JSP Hosting vs ASP Hosting
Having seen the benefits of JSP hosting, now it’s time to see why one should choose JSP over ASP? The prime reason is that ASP is Microsoft’s creation, which works only on Windows servers, and hence if you’re looking at Linux hosting, or running Linux apps, especially blogs like Wordpress, then ASP hosting won’t work for you. However, you don’t have this problem in case of JSP hosting, and it can be used across various OS platforms, and servers without any fuss. This primarily makes JPS hosting a universally accepted hosting solution, as opposed to limited usage of ASP hosting. But, at the same time, it is noteworthy to mention that ASP is superior to JSP hosting, if you’re planning to work with only Windows apps. There is also a nice article about the comparison of JSP and ASP solutions, which examines their similarities, uses, positives and drawbacks for each platfrfom.
Downsides of JSP
JSP pages are translated, and compiled into servlets, and in this process, errors that creep in your pages seem to be coming from HTML or Java servlets, making it tougher to debug the codes for web developers. Second major problem with JPS is that JSP pages require almost double the disk space required to hold the web page otherwise, in case of any other technology such as ASP; this is due to the sheer fact that JSP pages are translated into class files, and server needs to compulsorily store the resultant class files along with the JSP pages increasing the burden on web server.
On the Whole
In a nutshell, JSP hosting presents a whole lot of benefits as opposed to other technologies, thereby making it one of the most popular choices in the hosting arena. JSP enables a clean separation of presentation from the business logic helping in maintaining high coding standards. It uses Java as the primary scripting language, but it isn’t specific to any platform of a particular vendor, giving you high flexibility as opposed to active server pages technology from Microsoft.
Last but definitely not the least, JSP forms integral part of J2EE architecture, and gives full access to server-side resources, and clients needs not use specific browser, or configuration as the code execution takes place on server side. Despite all these benefits, before you really make a decision, it is important to consider all the aspects of your requirements, and pick the most suitable solution.