Directives provide general information about the the JSP page to the JSP engine

Basically we have three types of directives in jsp pages.

1. page
2. include
3. taglib

A page directive comprise the properties of a JSP page. An example for this is property language, contenttype, charset etc.

<%@page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>

An include directive will tell information about another file which would be included in JSP page. An example for Include is listed as below:

<%@ include file="forerunner.html" %>

we can include any kind of supportive files like JSP, HTML etc.

A taglib is used for associating a prefix with a tag library, example is listed below:
<%@ taglib uri="taglib.tld" prefix="hello" %>