From time to time, I update the examples based on reader feedback about bugs. It's my intention to only update the examples when they do not follow the specifications, as opposed to add work-arounds for specification-compliance bugs in various containers. In the latter case, I instead inform the vendor about the problem, in the hope that these examples will have a positive impact on container-compliance over time.

Changes compared to version 2.0

The following things have been changed compared to the initial version:

The example tag library validator has been disabled (commented out in the TLD) to avoid a JDOM dependency in applications that want to use the example tag library.
The missing HelloMIME servlet example source code file has been added.
The JSTL implementation has been upgraded to Apache Taglibs Standard 1.0.3, solving many problems related to reuse of tag handler classes in containers that use a tag handler pool (such as Tomcat 4.1.x), but not all: there are still problems with the custom actions in the I18N and Formatting library (the fmt default prefix), see below. Read the JSTL-RI-ReleaseNotes.html for details.

All examples have been tested with Tomcat 4.1.24. If you run into any problems with a previous version of Tomcat, I recommend that you upgrade to this version. Note that due to remaining bugs in the Standard 1.0.3 JSTL implementation, you should disable tag handler pooling in Tomcat 4.1.x with the enablePooling init parameter for the JSP container in the $CATALINA_HOME/conf/web.xml file:

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>jsp</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>logVerbosityLevel</param-name>
            <param-value>WARNING</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>enablePooling</param-name>
            <param-value>false</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <load-on-startup>3</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

Notes about the initial 2.0 version

This inital version of the examples includes the Apache Taglibs Standard tag library, version 1.0.1, which is the reference implementation of the JSTL 1.0 specification. To download a more recent version, if any, go to the Apache Taglibs web site.
All examples have been tested with Tomcat 4.0.4, using JDK 1.4 and JDK 1.3.1_01. Due to a bug in JDK 1.3.1_01, you need to explicitly specify that the bundled Xerces XML parser should be used when processing the JSTL XML actions. You can do this by setting a Java system property named "org.xml.sax.driver" to the value "org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser". The easiest way to do this for the Tomcat 4.0.x container is by setting the CATALINA_OPS environment variable:
```
  C:\> set CATALINA_OPS=-Dorg.xml.sax.driver=org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser
        
```
I recommend that you upgrade to JDK 1.4 instead, unless you have strong reasons to stay with JDK 1.3.1.