Often in JSP we find ourselves creating links to other pages within our web application.  The below code allows us to easily get the web application context path from within a JSP file.

${pageContext.request.contextPath}

Utilizing JSTL we could also set this value to a variable so that we have a short hand method for getting the context path.

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>

<c:set var="cp" scope="session"
        value="${pageContext.request.contextPath}" />

This enables you to use ${cp} to output the context path.