Data from database not being displayed in JSP

I showed this code to one of my collegue who is a software engineer..the database connection , the table the data in it all are correct, but he also was not able to trace the issue as of why data is not being displayed in the jsp page below is the code....

<%@page contentType="text/html"%>
<%@page pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@ page import="java.sql.*"%>
<%@page import="java.io.*"%>

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
        <title>Student Portal Interface</title>
    </head>
    <body>

<h1>Student Web Portal</h1>
    
    Courses being offered:
   <% System.out.println("Coruses") %>
       <%
          try
          {
               System.out.println("Printing");
              String ConnectionURL="jdbc:odbc:VirtualClassRoom","","";
              Connection connection = null;
              Statement statement = null;
              ResultSet rs = null;
              Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver");
              connection = DriverManager.getConnection(ConnectionURL," "," ");
              statement = connection.createStatement();
              String QueryString = "SELECT * from coursesPool";
              rs = statement.executeQuery(QueryString);
              
              
          
       %>

<%
       }
 catch(Exception ex)
 {
      ex.printStackTrace();
 }finally{
      rs.close();
 statement.close();
 connection.close();
 }
 
     %>
     
    <%--
    This example uses JSTL, uncomment the taglib directive above.
    To test, display the page like this: index.jsp?sayHello=true&name=Murphy
    --%>
    <%--
    <c:if test="${param.sayHello}">
        
        Hello ${param.name}!
    </c:if>
    --%>
    
    </body>
</html>

If this Java code was in a class, rather than following the really bad practice of placing it in a JSP, it'd be a lot easier to debug and test. That's the first step I'd take.

I Debugged this in netbeans and i got this below message

I don't even think that should compile. Line 25, for example, isn't valid Java code.

But that's just one of the things you have to deal with when you use scriptlets. If you had put that code in a Java class, where it belongs, you would have tried to compile it and found out right away that there was bad code in it. But when you put it in a JSP, you get messages in a log file, and you might get an error page depending on whether you configured an error page into your application. Which you probably didn't.