Declarations

Declarations are used to declare methods or variables that are initialized within a page and are accessible to other scriptlets, expressions, and declarations.
They are defined as global and are not permitted to write to a page.

Example of a declaration:

<%!
public java.util.Data PrintDate()
{
return(new java.util.Date());
}
%>

This declaration can now be used by an expression in order to print the date to the page:

The current date is:
<%= PrintDate() %>