Identifying a Custom Tag Library in a JSP 1.1 Container
Prior to JSP 1.2, the container didn’t locate custom tag libraries automatically. If you’re stuck with a container that doesn’t yet support JSP 1.2, you must tell it exactly where to find the TLD.
The first approach you can use is to specify a symbolic name as the
uri
attribute value, just as in JSP 1.2. But in
addition, you must define the mapping from the symbolic name to the
location of the library in the deployment descriptor for the
application (WEB-INF/web.xml):
<web-app> ... <taglib> <taglib-uri> orataglib </taglib-uri> <taglib-location> /WEB-INF/lib/orataglib_3_0.jar </taglib-location> </taglib> ... </web-app>
The <taglib-uri>
element contains the
symbolic name, and the <taglib-location>
element contains the path to the tag library JAR file, or to the TLD
file itself in case the library isn’t packaged in a
JAR file.
If the uri
attribute value
doesn’t match a symbolic name defined in the
web.xml file, the container assumes it is a file
path:
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/lib/orataglib_3_0.jar" prefix="ora" %>
If the path starts with a slash, it’s interpreted as a context-relative path (the path to the file from the root of the application installation directory), otherwise as a path relative to the JSP page (known as a page-relative path ). The file can be either the TLD file itself or a JAR file that includes the TLD file as META-INF/taglib.tld.
These two approaches work in JSP 1.2 or 2.0 container as well, but there’s rarely ...
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