JSP
I was doing a little reading yesterday and have to say that I'm more than a little disappointed in the state of JSP engines like Tomcat. If you look at similar scripting engines like PHP or even Microsoft's ASP, the web server is smart enough to know what to do based on the file extansion. But not Tomcat. It requires not only the file extension, but also the location. This is what I find a real pain.
I'm going to look into it more today to see what I can accomplish. Maybe it's a configuration issue that I can fix, but from what I've seen so far, it's just a pain in the rear.
OK... I've done some digging and my initial feelings about Tomcat were right. There are very specific directories that the JSP pages can go into. I can certainly understand the engine's need for this - it needs to generate files and then run them, but there's no technical reason that these files can't be located in any directory just like PHP and ASP files. I understand that most sites are static in their location, but once again, that seems to me to be a restriction that needn't apply. Ah... well... there's nothing I can do about it, and I'm certainly not impressed with the speed of JSP.