IF you really want to impress your clients I would stay away from JSP if you can and look at some of the JAVA web frameworks. I am just learning about one myself called wicket and it is awesome. It allows you to write pure java code and pure html markup and it uses tags in the html markup and java code to merge the 2 together. It does all the heavy lifting for you and it is really neat. It is much better than writing in JSP and having to add all kinds of messy javascript to my code and mixing your JSP with your html code. wicket handles all of that kind of stuff for me. There are a bunch of different frameworks out there that are good and each one is a little different and may serve your needs better.