Introduction

Most web sites include some type of multimedia and interactive programs, such as digital videos, digital audio files, Macromedia Flash movies, and Java applets. Therefore, Java web sites often integrate this type of content with servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs). This chapter explains the basics of embedding multimedia in Java web components. This process involves including the object and embed tags in your component's HTML output.

A JSP is the preferred choice for combining multimedia with dynamic content, because you can make the tags that you use to embed the multimedia a part of the JSP's HTML template text. However, Recipe 17.5 also shows how to include multimedia as part of a servlet's output.

If the page containing the multimedia content does not have to include any other type of dynamic output, just use a static HTML page instead of executing JSPs and servlets. A static page typically requires fewer server resources to respond to HTML page requests.