Hi there,

I have a slightly different spin to this question and I would say that it 
depends on what you want to do. As a rule of thumb, I would tend to use 
JavaBeans for business objects, accessing data and storing session state. 
Custom tags on the other hand I would use for generating HTML, iterating, 
etc and also for accessing enterprise resources such as EJBs.

Maintainability is an important issue, but regardless of whether you use 
tags or beans, the page designers probably won't be responsible for 
maintaining the Java code. For this reason, I would probably recommend 
that you limit the HTML that gets generated in your tags - in other words, 
leave this on the JSPs where it belongs.

Hope that helps...

Regards
Simon
Co-author Professional JSP, 2nd edition