Paul Wood has put together an article for O’Reillynet that looks like it may be that perfect length: long enough and in depth enough without being too much for an online article. Here’s the lead in:
I have decided to use Tomcat 4 Servlet/JSP Container technologies to implement a Web application. This still leaves many options, and choosing between the various available technologies is not easy. For this article, I have chosen to keep it simple and use Java Server Pages (JSPs) in combination with Java classes.