Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages™

14.1. The Components That Make Up a Tag Library

In order to use custom JSP tags, you need to define three separate components: the tag handler class that defines the tag's behavior, the tag library descriptor file that maps the XML element names to the tag implementations, and the JSP file that uses the tag library. The rest of this section gives an overview of each of these components and the following sections give details on how to build these components for various different styles of tags.

The Tag Handler Class

When defining a new tag, your first task is to define a Java class that tells the system what to do when it sees the tag. This class must implement the javax.servlet.jsp.tagext.Tag interface. This is usually accomplished by extending ...