How can I declare methods within my JSP page?

You can declare methods for use within your JSP page as declarations. The methods can then be invoked within any other methods you declare, or within JSP scriptlets and expressions.

Do note that you do not have direct access to any of the JSP implicit objects like request, response, session and so forth from within JSP methods. However, you should be able to pass any of the implicit JSP variables as parameters to the methods you declare. For example:

<%! 
      public String whereFrom(HttpServletRequest req) {
      HttpSession ses = req.getSession();
      ... 
      return req.getRemoteHost();
     }
%>
<%
     out.print("Hi there, I see that you are coming in from  ");
%>
<%= whereFrom(request) %>