I had to do some maintenance work recently on a JSP app. Normally, I avoid JSP like the plague because my (dated) experience with it has been mostly bad. The app I had to maintain was a stone age thing full of scriptlets, but I did a little research and used JSTL to do some of the work on the updates. I was pretty impressed with how cleanly you can do some flow control stuff now. So, I started some new development on a new project with JSP as a proof of concept to see if it is a tolerable programming environment now. It isn’t. For the real basics, there has been a lot of improvement, but some of the mechanisms for taglibs, dealing with variable between servlet/JSP, etc. are still very clunky. And today I encountered this. If you forget to put the return type when defining a function within your app, you get a super mysterious error.

I guess you could blame the implementation (Jasper), but what does anyone else use? Also, you can sort of tell from the screen shot of the editor, but the JSP editor in the current version of Eclipse is pretty awful. It displays some of your double quotes as single quotes, which is really awkward.