Directives vs Actions
The special JSP elements include directives and actions.
Directives provide “global” information about the behavior of a JSP page—independent of any specific request.
- In practice, they guide the process of translation from JSP to Java.
An action has some effect in the context of a particular request.
- e.g. generating some output that depends on form parameters, or creating an object in the JSP container.
In other words, an action is a “request-time” operation.
This boils down to the more familiar distinction between compile-time and run-time commands.