How could they be? The request and response are passed to the service() method of the JSP. A call from that method to your defined method must pass the reference along.
The only way to have made them available to methods defined in a JSP* without passing them along would have been to make them instance variables of the JSP
servlet. Which of course can't happen due to
thread safety issues.
*My opinion: bad idea. Very bad idea.
[ December 07, 2004: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]