About JSP Pages and Business Components

JDeveloper provides facilities to develop a special kind of web application based on a combination of JSP technology and Oracle's Business Components for Java (BC4J) framework. We call this kind of web application a Business Components JSP application—or BC4J JSP application for short.

A BC4J JSP application consists of a set of JSP pages that can use:

JDevelopers's BC4J data tags from the provided-BC4J Data Tags custom tag library to embed dynamic content in HTML formatted pages
JDeveloper's BC4J component tags from the provided-BC4J Data Tags custom tag library to generate dynamic content together with predefined HTML formatting

A BC4J JSP application uses the Business Components for Java (BC4J) framework to browse and update a database. Specifically, a BC4J JSP application communicates with a business components application module and its associated view objects. When you generate a BC4J JSP application using one of the JDeveloper Data Page wizards or the Business Components JSP Application Wizard, you choose which of several JSP page templates to use to generate for the view objects. Each of the JSP page templates consists of one or more JSP pages built using JDeveloper-provided JSP tags from the BC4J Data Tags custom tag library.

The tag-based approach to building JSP web applications with Business Components does not require extensive Java programming and is very much like coding an HTML page. When you want to create your own BC4J JSP pages rather than generated them from the wizards, you can

Add BC4J data tags from the Component Palette when you need maximum customization of JSP pages at a low level
Add BC4J component tags from the Component Palette when you want to work with reusable components that provide predefined HTML formatting