If your doing presentation layer only you should play around with css and form layouts. For the back end and processing of records you should get familiar with databases and MVC pattern.
Use File listFiles() and a comparator to sort your array by last mod date.
Apache Commons IO package has LastModifiedFileComparator that you can also use.
Sounds like something you would want to do with AJAX where you can use XML and JSON. Look at Open Java Trading System (OJTS) to provide additional guidance.
Your using session object so you need to change request to session in your JSP and it should work. I would refrain from using Scriptlets as they are outdated technology in JSP.
See below example...
There is no native member variable or field in the Java. You can access Java object fields from native code, or you can associate native language objects with Java objects by various techniques.
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Both are good Collection classes. HashTable is synchronized where it can be used concurrently by multiple processes/threads without need for synchronization outside of the object. HashMap is not and...