OK, I tried your suggestions. Let me explained how.
First of all, keep in mind that I now have two "projects" (not JBuilder projects, but rather two avenues I am pursuing.)
1. Try to get my taglibs to work in JBuilder using a tag library jar. This involved creating the jar, adding it to the necessary libraries for this project, and adding the tld (in addition to its place in the jar) to /WEB-INF
2. Try to get my taglibs to work period, using just the classes, tlds, and Tomcat 4.0 standalone. This came out of the fact the 1 wasn't happening and I wanted to see if the problem was the jar deployment process. This involved simply putting the tld in WEB-INF/tlds, the *Display.classes in WEB-INF/classes/coctags/, and making sure my JSp referred to the tld properly.
Simon, in 2, I changed the taglib directive to reflect the fact that coctags.tld resided in WEB-INF/tlds/. Still, I get the same error. I was going to use an XML mapping in web.xml, to decouple the talib directly from the jsp, but first I just wanted to make it work. Still nothing, so far. The same error: tag with that name not found in taglib with prefix coc. As I said, my tld looks alright, I think I have the right directory structure, and the taglib directive is getting the coctags.tld. It's just not finding the tag alphDisplay in that tld (or maybe it can't find the class.) But I printed the directory structure. Is the tld referring to the classes properly? Are they in the right place?
Jignesh,
Good suggestion. I didn't know that (in project 1) my jar file had to have the taglib named taglib.tld, as opposed to something else. The META-INF directory is there, but the tld was not named properly. So I changed the name, and I also changed the tld to add the uri element. I simply used "coc". Then in my jsp file, I changed the taglib directive to say:
Naturally, as you can see, I changed my prefix (to avoid any naming complications), so my reference to it later has been changed to:
Finally, I added the uri change to the tld that resided in /WEB-INF (for JBuilder, as suggested above).
In this case, I get the error: "Could not find file /coc".
So, again, in case this was a problem in JBuilder, I added the URI change to the tld in project 2 (the tomcat, JAR-less edition), and made the appropriate changes to the jsp (referring to it as "coc".)
At this point, I have made about 4 or 5 changes, all of them straightforward, and seemingly with little room for mistake. But mistakes there must be, either in the changes or in the original structure. I could understand if project 1 wasn't working. It involves a rather complicated
IDE, with necessary libraries, etc. But project 2 should be rather simple. TLD in the appropriate place, classes in the appropriate place, tld referring to classes properly, and jsp referring to the tld properly. As I mentioned, in project 2, the only thing I am usure of is the location of the tag classes themselves. I honestly can't see any other problem. Of course, that doesn't really mean anything.
Thank you all for your help. I really do appreciate it. But does anyone have any ideas?