In our last post, we talked about how to write custom JSP tags and add them to a taglib. Today we will go over the most famous taglib of all. The JSTL, or Java Standard Tag Library, is exactly what its name says it is. And like the rest of the Java EE family, it is defined by a specification, and implemented by a servlet container. The library tries to define tags which perform the most common tasks you might use on a JSP page, so that you don’t have to write them yourself.
The example code for this post can be found in the jsp_jstl branch of our example repository on Github, and a ZIP file of the code can be found here.