• In the JSP directives are the messages to JSP container. That produce global information about an entire JSP page.
• In the JSP directives are used to give special instruction to a container for translation of JSP to servlet code.
• In the JSP life cycle phase, JSP has to be converted to a servlet which is the translation phase.
• Those give instructions to the container on how to handle certain aspects of JSP processing
• The directives can have many attributes by comma-separated as key-value pairs.
• Into the JSP, the directive is described in <%@ %> tags.

There are three types of directives:

• Page directive
• Include directive
• Taglib directive

Syntax of Page directive :

<%@ page…%>

• These provide attributes that get applied to the entire JSP page.
• These defines page dependent attributes, such as scripting language, error page, and buffering requirements.
• These are used to provide instructions to a container that pertains to the current JSP page.

Following is its list of attributes associated with page directive:

1.  Language
2.  Extends
3.  Import
4.  contentType
5.  info
6.  session
7.  isThreadSafe
8.  autoflush
9.  buffer
10.  IsErrorPage
11. pageEncoding
12.  errorPage
13. isELIgonored