Modernizing JavaServer Pages by Transformation

One way to improve the maintainability of a web application is to separate its presentation from the business logic. Such separation not only makes a web application easier to evolve and maintain, but also allows individual developers with different skills to cooperate more efficiently. Custom tags are a recent addition to the JSP standard that helps to facilitate this separation. In this paper, we present a transform to restructure JSP pages by moving embedded Java code into custom tags without changing the original functionality or user interface. This reduces the complexity of the web applications, makes them more maintainable and makes best use different skill sets.