According to a survey on Netcraft (an internet server analysis site), the number of JSP (Java Server Pages) sites has grown almost 100% over last year, despite Microsoft's heavy push for ASP (Active Server Pages) and .NET development. More interesting is that almost 26% of the sites are running Microsoft Windows.

I wasn't as surprised as the authors to see Linux as number one (with 40%), especially with Oracle's push for Linux database deployment over the last couple of years, but it is good to see the non-Microsoft solutions moving relatively quickly as well.

If you haven't used JSP and you are looking for options in the world of server technology, it is well worth a look. It is essentially the Java version of PHP, allowing you to create text pages that contain directives that are executed on the server, without having to write programs that explicitly output HTML. It's a nice step away from technologies such as CGI scripting (in almost any language) because of the ability to intermingle the instructions with the HTML.

Of course, it does require a Java execution environment on your server, but that can be achieved pretty easily using the Jakarta server that can be obtained from the Apache Software Foundation.