I am new to JSPs and Servlets - I am wondering if there is any way for a JSP of delegating to a servlet the generation of given areas of the page such as custom controls (AWT stuff and such).
The reason why I am looking into this is that JSP pages can get really messy really fast.
Examples appreciated!
You can make a subrequest and have the subrequest's output sent to the client instead of being buffered. For example <c:import url="path/to/servlet"/> (or use jsp:include).
If you want to call some custom Java code to produce output during a JSP page, you might consider using a custom JSP tag instead of a servlet, though. There should be less overhead since the tag is basically just instantiated and called, and the scheme for passing parameters to tags is much cleaner.
Aside of <jsp:include /> (or <c:import />, or custom tags), and if your goal is to make the JSPs more maintenable, take a look at JTPL templates: http://jtpl.sourceforge.net/ - old, but usefull stuff :)
You may also consider use of some of component MVC frameworks - an implementation of JSF, for example.