I am having hard time deciding if a piece of functionality should be implemented as tag library or server side objects to be used in scriptlets within a JSP page. Are there any guidelines and what are the performance implications?

Simon Brown

Some guidelines are given in a previous jGuru answer, but as regards performance implications, it really depends on the functionality you wish to encapsulate.

At the end of the day custom tags are server-side objects too. If you take a look at the Java source code generated by your JSP engine, you'll notice that calls to your tags are handled by instantiating the appropriate supporting class and calling the appropriate lifecycle methods on them.