y limit the qn to jsp ? how about
servlets ? that's what jsps finally get converted into, right ?
And in both cases the answer is no. To understand this, think about the lifecycle of Servlets, do we
initialize them explicitly - no. After all servlets are intsantiated and maintained by the container.
Is it possible to get a handle to an existing Servlet object - no. There used to be a getServlets() method
in the context object which is now deprecated and would return null (according to Sun).
Theorotically it may be possible to say new Servlet() (I have never tried it out, so Iam not sure), however you couldnt call the Servlets doGet() or doPost() method, coz you cannot prepare the request and response objects,
for the same reason you cannot call init(). It may be possible, if for some bizzare reason(I cant think of any), you have your own public method inside the Servlet (& then u do a new Servlet() and call this method), but why would anybody do such a thing is quite beyond me. The same goes for static methods :-)
Tx,
Ram.