Best practice: Saving form data

Question

Hello,
I'm new to the JSP technology.
To get some experience I built my own little shoutbox "application" where you can insert your name and a message and if you click on "submit" your message appears at the top of the page. Older messages also appear below the new message.
For this, I created a little JavaBean which handles the entered name and the message. I called this class "Message".
To read the messages out of the database I created another class (MessageHandler) which returns an ArrayList of objects from the Message class.
I don't know if I'm doing this the right way, but I use this MessageHandler as a JavaBean so that I can do this:
<jsp:useBean id="handler" scope="session" class="net.stiefels.myshoutbox.MessageHandler"/>
<jsp:setProperty name="handler" property="limitMessages" value="2"/>
<c:forEach items="${handler.messages}" var="msg">
     ${msg.text}<br/>
</c:forEach>The next step is, "how to save new data?".
With my current experience in JSP I found this possibility:
Save the form data in a "Message"-Bean and use a MessageHandler method (e.g. setNewMessage) to save the data in the database. The code would then look like this:
<jsp:useBean class="net.stiefels.myshoutbox.MessageHandler" id="handler" scope="session"/>
<jsp:useBean class="net.stiefels.myshoutbox.Message" id="newMessage" scope="page"/>
<jsp:setProperty name="newMessage" property="*"/>  // save form data
<jsp:setProperty name="handler" property="newMessage" value="${newMessage}"/>  // save Message-Bean in databaseMy question now is if this way is the normal procedure to save form input in a database?
If not, which way would be a better one?
Thanks a lot!
Simon

Answer 1

I never use that approach
Simple pages
When I submit I have a servlet or Struts action that does the insert and then redirects/forwards to the submitting JSP , this JSP will then requery DB.
More complex
Always start with Struts and store all information on the Struts actionform.