JSP 2.0 running in Tomcat /webapps

Question

Hi Everyone,
I've been racking my mind on figuring out how to run JSP 2.0 pages outside of Tomcat's "jsp-examples "directory. (running Tomcat 5.0.19)
Initially, I created a subdirectory in the webapps directory called "jcce". In "jcce", I wrote a test page using JSP 2.0's Expression Language. The file included the code:
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<% String s = "Work! Work! Work!";
pageContext.setAttribute("name", s); %>
<c:out value='${"name"}' />
However, the page displays ${"name"}. When I place the same page inside a subdirectory of the "jsp-examples" directory, it displays "Work! Work! Work!"
I looked at the lib directories in each WEB-INF directories and they contain the same jar files. I'm guessing it has something to do with configuring the web.xml file. The problem is that I've read so many tutorials on JSP 2.0 (even the specs), www.apache.org (jakarta project), JSTL, etc. and no one has mentioned how to configure the web.xml file appropriately to run JSP 2.0 pages on Tomcat.
So my questions are:
1. How can I deploy an application independently of the "jsp-examples" directory so that my JSP pages can takes advantage of the JSP 2.0 tag libraries?
2. If I have to configure the web.xml file, can someone send me a simple configuration for the test code above?
BTW, I've redeployed, and restarted Tomcat to see if any configuration changes would run the JSP 2.0 engine, but no success.
Please help!
Thanks,
Bernard

Answer 1

You're right, the web.xml file is probably the culprit.
To retain backwards compatibility with web applications. EL is disabled in certain cases. (JSP spec section 3.3.2)
There is a new page directive
<%@ page isELIgnored="true|false"%>
(Try putting <%@ page isELIgnored="false"%> at the top of your page to see if it will work with it)
There is also a setting in the web.xml
Check your web.xml file - if the DTD is less than version 2.4 and you haven't specified EL handling in web.xml or the page directive, EL is disabled by default.
This should be the text at the top of web.xml.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd"
version="2.4">
Hope this helps,
evnafets