Question

How can I use Servlets to access the HTML uses of having JSP without having to have all my client-facing pages called *.jsp?
I would rather do this than using all the response.write() stuff because I think it is easier to read and maintain when it is all clean “HTML”.
Is this is fair assesment?

EDIT: What I’m going for is having the Servlets output things to the screen without having to redirect to a .jsp file.
In this way, I could write all the JSP stuff, but when it comes time to display it, the page the URL the user sees is essentially, “http://blah.com/posts/post-id” which is the address of the servlet and not “http://blah.com/posts.jsp?pos=post-id“.
But I would still write all presentation logic in an external .jsp.

Answer 1

Just hide the JSP away in /WEB-INF folder so that noone can access it directly and create a servlet which forwards the request to this JSP file. Don’t do a redirect, else you will see the new URL being reflected in the address bar. E.g.

protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
    String postId = request.getPathInfo();
    // Do your business thing here. Any results can be placed in request scope. E.g.
    request.setAttribute("post", post); // post is a bean containing information you'd like to display in JSP.
    // Then forward request to JSP file.
    request.getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/posts.jsp").forward(request, response);
}

Map this servlet on an url-pattern of /posts/*.

In the /WEB-INF/posts.jsp make use of taglibs to control page flow and EL to access the data. E.g.

<h2>${post.title}</h2>
<p><fmt:formatDate value="${post.date}" type="date" /> - ${post.message}</p>

Finally just invoke the servlet by http://example.com/posts/postid. The /postid part will be available by HttpServletRequest#getPathInfo(). You need to parse the value yourself and do the business thing with it.