JSTL in JSP

[nirjari patel]

I am looking at JSP page, which has code line as follows

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/tags-bean" prefix="bean" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/tags-html" prefix="html" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/tags-logic" prefix="logic" %>

This taglib will have to be installed on local environment. How is it referred in jsp ? I dont see any code in jsp, which refers to the location of JSTL. So how does jsp invoke these tags ? Is it through classpath ?
If its so , how is classpath set for JSTL ? Is it just as classpath is set for java ?

Thanks

[Swastik Dey]

The classpath for any web application is WEB-INF\lib. So, you should keep the library file there.

[Bear Bibeault]

Those are Struts libraries. They have nothing at all to do with the JSTL.

[nirjari patel]

My mistake, this is struts.
but confusion still remains, how is it referred in JSP ? I dont see any code, where this classes are called in JSP page. So are these strut classes specified in classpath OR is there another mechanism ?

thanks

[Bear Bibeault]

The taglib declaration uses the URI to find the matching jar file in the class path and match up the prefix to it. There doesn't need to be any code (there should never be any code) in the JSP page to use it.

Note that the URI is not a location. It's just a string that just happens to look like a URL.

[nirjari patel]

This is where I am getting confused.

<%@ taglib uri="http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/tags-bean" prefix="bean" %>

Do you mean to say, whenever jsp page with above code is loaded, it will make call to http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/tags-bean and load tags-bean from there ?

Thanks

[Bear Bibeault]

While "make a call" isn't the right terminology, essentially yes.