Hello,
JSTL, also known as standard tagslib, is a useful library of tags usable in servlet containers like Tomcat.
There are two versions of tagslibs:
JSTL 1.1
http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/doc/standard-doc/intro.html
requires a servlet container adhering to Java Servlet 2.4 and JavaServer Pages 2.0 (e.g.: Tomcat 5)
JSTL 1.0
http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/doc/standard-1.0-doc/intro.html
requires a servlet container adhering to Java Servlet 2.3 and JavaServer Pages 1.2 (e.g.: Tomcat 4)
For the question "What does JSTL do?", here's an excerpt from their own homepage:
"JSTL encapsulates, as simple tags, core functionality common to many JSP applications. For example, instead of suggesting that you iterate over lists using a scriptlet or different iteration tags from numerous vendors, JSTL defines a standard <forEach> tag that works the same everywhere.
This standardization lets you learn a single tag and use it on multiple JSP containers. Also, when tags are standard, containers can recognize them and optimize their implementations.
JSTL provides support for core iteration and control-flow features, text inclusion, internationalizaton-capable formatting tags, and XML-manipulation tags. It also supports an expression language to simplify page development. Developers may also be interested in JSTL's current extensibility mechanisms; JSTL currently provides a framework for integrating custom tags with JSTL tags."
Alhough taglibs' jar file can be deployed internally to each web-app using them (via the /WEB-INF/lib/ directory) they can be installed into $TOMCAT_HOME/shared/lib/ in order to be visible to every webapp without the need to have copies and copies of the same libraries. :)
What I say can be applied to Tomcat, I have no knowledge of other servlet containers.
Regarding installation, JSTL binary distributions come with some library (like xerces). In Tomcat 4 I had to put those libraries together with jstl.jar and standard.jar (the real libs). Tomcat 5 doesn't need them.
I haven't checked it out if those two jar files can simply be put in the classpath in order to work.
Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
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