Abstract

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been sweeping the globe. For a long time, information technology was mainly passive; users went online and downloaded data. Today, information technology offers interactive and communication functions, which makes e-commerce more than a fad. Now, it has become a part of the way people live their lives. Dynamic Web sites contain Web pages that display constantly changing content; a technique that is an important foundation of e-commerce. There are two ways to achieve dynamic content generation: programmatic content generation, and template-based content generation. Java servlets falls into the first category, while JavaServer Pages (JSP) belongs to the second category. JSP is a simple but powerful technology used to generate dynamic HTML on the server side. They are a direct extension of Java servlets and provide a way to separate content generation from content presentation. In this project, Tomcat was adopted to be the JSP engine and this thesis designs an online health consulting and shopping center that can provide users personal dietary assessment, nutritional news, professional knowledge of nutrition, special diets for patients, the posting of questions and shopping for nutritional supply products. On the other hand, the project connects to a Microsoft Access database using a type 1 JDBC-ODBC Bridge, plus ODBC driver. In this way, staff can easily manage different kind of information in the database of this health center. In short, JSP is more convenient to write by using conventional HTML writing tools and easier to modify because only the dynamic parts need to be changed when updating a web page. Furthermore, JSP with Java is more flexible because they are platform independent.