I am only a couple of months into Java so I hope I dont tread on any toes
here!
The problem as I see it is this: both ASP and JSP embed code in your HTML,
which makes it problematic to use tools such as Frontpage et al to redesign
the content or manage the site - managing large ASP/JSP sites becomes a real
headache.
Using Servlets or WebClasses to generate HTML from code is even uglier -
anyone trying to generate more than simple HTML from println statements is
going to lose a lot of hair.
I thought MS had come out with the perfect compromise in VB6/WebClasses with
their template system. Basically an HTML template was parsed by the WebClass
and matching tags were replaced by custom data/HTML or whatever and the result
sent to the browser. That way HTML stays (mostly) in the template, and code
stays in the application. Sadly I have yet to see this feature in the Java
world, so I have written my own parser servlets and am very happy with the
result. I can write my pages in Frontpage (or other HTML editor) putting
custom tags where I want my data to appear, then when the page is requested
the servlet scans it and substitutes the data, typically with fields from
persistent objects retrieved from a database.
Am I reinventing the wheel here? Has this already been done (probably better
too!) Anyone interested in this approach?

Rgds
Ewan