You can’t use the ‘out’ variable (nor any of the other “predeclared” scriptlet variables) inside directives.
The JSP page gets translated by your webserver into a Java servlet. Inside tomcats, for instance, everything inside scriptlets (which start “<%”), along with all the static HTML, gets translated into one giant Java method which writes your page, line by line, to a JspWriter instance called “out”. This is why you can use the “out” parameter directly in scriptlets. Directives, on the other hand (which start with “<%!”) get translated as separate Java methods.
As an example, a very simple page (let’s call it foo.jsp):
<html>
<head/>
<body>
<%!
String someOutput() {
return "Some output";
}
%>
<% someOutput(); %>
</body>
</html>
would end up looking something like this (with a lot of the detail ignored for clarity):
public final class foo_jsp
{
// This is where the request comes in
public void _jspService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws IOException, ServletException
{
// JspWriter instance is gotten from a factory
// This is why you can use 'out' directly in scriptlets
JspWriter out = ...;
// Snip
out.write("<html>");
out.write("<head/>");
out.write("<body>");
out.write(someOutput()); // i.e. write the results of the method call
out.write("</body>");
out.write("</html>");
}
// Directive gets translated as separate method - note
// there is no 'out' variable declared in scope
private String someOutput()
{
return "Some output";
}
}