JSTL 1.1.2, TOMCAT 5.5, JDK 5, Eclipse and Problems

Question

I have been having trouble loading the JSTL library (standard.jar & jstl.jar)
I'm using Eclipse 3.0.2 to do my development work on my JSP pages. So normally I will just create my Tomcat(5.5 on JDK5.0) project using Sysdeo(tm) plugin in its default directory (C:\eclipse\workspace\mytomcatproject).
Then I would begin creating my JSPs and use JSTL(1.1.2) for my development. I'd put those standard.jar/jstl.jar into /WEB-INF/lib as recommended.
The problem is I can't seem to get JSTL library working, even I tried out copy and pasting the example code into my pages.
I have :
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="fn" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/functions" %>
... //some code
${fn:escapeXml(param["myreq"])} will show out in the JSP exactly "${fn:escapeXml(param["myreq"])}" without processing. Although no runtime errors comes out (meaning the TOMCAT successfully loaded the library) but seems that the taglib is not working!!!
I did some experiments:
Experiment 1 :-
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core" %>
(notice the uri, its without /jsp)
and it works for /core taglib, but not the /functions taglib. Meaning somewhere in the TOMCAT library it load the older 1.0 version of JSTL.
When I try using the /functions taglib
<%@ taglib prefix="fn" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/functions" %>
TOMCAT will complaint about the non-existence of this JSTL.
Experiment 2 :-
I tried to copy all the JSTL tld into my /WEB-INF/tld and and change my web.xml to include the tld location by using <jsp-config><taglib>.
Doesn't work as well!!! The taglib just didn't get process.
Experiment 3 :-
I tried to modify the <Context> in server.xml to include tldNameAware and tldValidation to TRUE.
Not Working as well!!!
Experiment 4 :-
I comment out the <my_tomcat_home>/conf/server.xml <Context> (the one that Eclipse created for my Tomcat project) and directly paste my project directory into <my_tomcat_home>/webapps and restarted my TOMCAT.
IT WORKS!!!
So does JSTL 1.1.2 only works in TOMCAT webapps home? Seems that TOMCAT only load the /WEB-INF/lib when the project is in its webapps, but when the project is outside of the webapps dir, it seems doesn't process the JSTL lib.
Any idea how to make it work outside the Tomcat webapps cause I try to encourage my team to use Eclipse and CVS.

Answer 1

The probable cause of the issue is your web.xml file.
If your web.xml file is declared as being servlet version 2.3, then it disables the JSTL expression language (EL) by default.
ie if you have this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC
   "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
   "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">
<web-app>It should change to be this:
<?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">Undo all of that hacking you did through the config files.
JSTL needs no tld files, and no entries in web.xml to make it work.
Hope this helps,
evnafets