I would like to let users customize pages, let's call them A and B. So basically I want to provide a hyperlink to a jps page with big text box where a user should be able to enter any text, html (to appear on page A), with ability to preview it and save.
I haven't really deal with this sort of issues before and would appreciate help on how implement it (examples and reference would be very helpful too)
Thanks
Are you using any kind of web framework(Spring MVC / Struts / Tapestry / etc...)? If you are, they all have tutorials on dealing with user inputs / form submission, so take a look at that. They all differ slightly in how user input is processed so it's impossible to answer this question generically.
If you're not (e.g. this is straight JSP), take a look at this tutorial.
Basically, what you want to do is to define an HTML form on your page B with textarea where user would input custom HTML. When form is submitted, you'll get the text user entered as a request parameter and you can store it somewhere (in the database / flat file / memory / what have you). On your page A you'll need to retrieve that text and bind it to request or page scope, you can then display it using <%= %> or <jsp:getProperty> tags.
To ChssPly76's answer I'd just add that if you're going to provide text entry of html on a web page (or anywhere, really) you're going to want to provide some kind of validation and a mechanism to provide feedback if the html is bad. You might dispense with this for a raw internal tool but anything for public consumption will need it. e.g. what do you do if someone enters
<b>sometext
You can deal with this with simple rules that parse away html tags, a preview that lets people know how they're doing so far ala stackoverflow, an rtf input option, or just a validate and if the tags don't balance a big honking "Try again", but you'll want some kind of check that you won't just be putting up broken pages.