Well for one thing, I suspect that your outer loop should start above the <tr> tag.

Other than that, an ArrayList is a one-dimensional structure (not surprisingly, since it s a list). Trying to display this data in a table implies it s two dimensional, but without generics you ve given no information as to what s contained within the list.

I d approach this something like this:

    /* header rows */

        <% for (int i = 0; i < rows.size(); i++) { 
           Object rowObj = rows.get(i);
        %>
        <tr>

            <% for (int j = 0; j < 7; j++) {
               // This RHS made up due to not knowing the class of objects
               // in your map, use something equivalent
               Object cell = rowObj.getEntry(j); 
            %>
            <td>
                <center>
                   <%=cell.toString()%>
                </center>
            </td>
            <% } %>
        </tr>
        <% } %>

You should not use scriptlets for this. Use JSTL/EL for this. Shortly back I ve posted an example, you can find here: Places where JavaBeans are used?

It s a perfect scenario for using JSP taglibs. There is a huge list of available tablibs over at jsptags.com That way the HTML will be very readable but you ll have your dynamic table.

As others have pointed out you would want to use tags rather than generate a table yourself using scriptlets. The benefits are more than I care to list here. I would recommend looking at the Display tag library. It makes it trivially easy to generate a table from any Collection.

 <display:table name="rows">
    <display:column property="id" title="ID" />
    <display:column property="name" />
    <display:column property="email" />
    <display:column property="status" />
    <display:column property="description" title="Comments"/>
 </display:table>

Of course each column would refer to a property of the objects that you have in your ArrayList.

You may use core JSTL library (download it from http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_taglibs.html).

Include jstl.jar and standard.jar libraries from this distribution into you class path. Then place directive <%@taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %> on top of your jsp-file. And use construction like this:

...  
<br/>
<table><br/>
<c:forEach items="${rows}" var="row"><br/>
<tr><br/>
<c:forEach items="${row}" var="column"><br/>
<td><br/>
<c:out value="${column}"/><br/>
</td><br/>
</c:forEach><br/>
</tr><br/>
</c:forEach><br/>
</table><br/>
...