Archived: Installing JSTL 1.0 Apache Implementation

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∟Archived: Installing JSTL 1.0 Apache Implementation

This section provides a tutorial example on how to download and install Apache Standard Taglib 1.0.4, which is an open-source implementation of the JSTL 1.0. Only 2 JAR files are needed: standard.jar and jstl.jar.

Standard Taglib 1.0.4 is Jakara Taglibs's open-source implementation of the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.0. I did the following to download the latest release of Standard Taglib 1.0.4:

Go to http://apache.towardex.com/jakarta/taglibs/standard-1.0/ and download jakarta-taglibs-standard-current.zip.
Unzip it to \local directory, and read \local\jakarta-taglibs-standard-1.0.4\README.
Then create a new directory in Tomcat server: "mkdir \local\jakarta-tomcat-4.1.18\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\lib" and copy jar files to there: "copy \local\jakarta-taglibs-standard-1.0.4\lib\*.jar \local\jakarta-tomcat-4.1.18\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\lib".
Restart Tomcat, and you are ready to try Taglib 1.0.4.

To test JSTL 1.0 Apache implementation, let's try a very simple example, using JSTL to display "Hello world!". Here is my JSP source code, hello_jstl.jsp:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<html><body>
<c:out value="Hello world!"/>
</body></html>

Save it to \local\jakarta-tomcat-4.1.18\webapps\ROOT, and run IE with url: http://localhost:8080/hello_jstl.jsp. Guess what? You will receive crashing page with an error message like: "javax.servlet.ServletException: Cannot inherit from final class".

So what happened? I really don't know. My guess is that some of the JAR files from Taglib 1.0.4 are not compatible with Tomcat 4.1.18. To approve this, I removed all Taglib jar files, except standard.jar and jstl.jar, from \local\jakarta-tomcat-4.1.18\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\lib. I restarted Tomcat and ran IE again with url: http://localhost:8080/hello_jstl.jsp. I got the prefect message "Hello world!" in the IE window!