Class as an attribute name in JSP tag file

Question

I just ran into an issue where I was writing a custom tag to generate a specific set of HTML elements, and wanted to be able to use CSS the same way I had before refactoring it into a tag. So, I included 'class' as an attribute in the custom tag file and deployed.
On Glassfish v3, this generated a bunch of JasperExceptions in the Javac compilation, complaining about <identifier> expected and reaching the end of file while parsing. I tracked it down, of course, to the use of 'class' as an attribute name, which was reduced to a servlet class defining:
public String getClass() {
   return this.class;
public void setClass(String class) {
   this.class = class;
}I'm curious -- which part of the process messed up here? Is "class" a valid identifier under the Java EE spec, and the translation should have used something like setClass_(String class_)? Or is it invalid, and Netbeans didn't know to mark it as an error before it tried to deploy? (And, of course, that I missed that in the spec, making it my fault.) I couldn't find anything specifically saying that reserved words couldn't be used as JSTL identifiers, so my gut is that the parser messed up. Also, I found a bug report about it for an alternate web container, but no mention of it in the bug trackers for Glassfish, Tomcat or Jasper.
Where's the blame?

Answer 1

stdunbar wrote:
I think that Netbeans messed up. getClass() is, of course, defined on Object and class is a Java keyword.What's to stop the compiler from recognizing that "class" would be a problem and mapping it to an alternate name behind the scenes?
This is the only documentation I turned up. Maybe this says it's invalid:
Java EE SpecThe unique name of the attribute being declared. A translation error results if more than one attribute directive appears in the same translation unit with the same name.A translation error results if the value of a name attribute of an attribute directive is equal to the value of the dynamic-attributes attribute of a tag directive or the value of a name-given attribute of a variable directive.