Day: December 27, 2008

Every now & then I need to whip out a quick webapp. Normally, I would prefer to use something like freemarker or velocity. But JSP is standard, and it’s everywhere. Despite it’s inability to be secure, it is convenient. And that’s gotta count for something right?

But, I never quite managed to get everything working. So whilst looking at tclogview, I figured it out. First of all, you have to get the dependencies correct.

  
    javax.servlet
    servlet-api
    2.5
    provided
  
  
    javax.servlet.jsp
    jsp-api
    2.1
    provided
  
  
    javax.servlet
    jstl
    runtime
    1.2
  

So you need to pull in both the servlet API and the JSP API. They’re both “provided” scope, which means that they have to be available when compiling, but they don’t need to be packaged as they’ll be there already. I’m not sure why you need the JSP API. When I was playing with NetBeans, it appeared to be necessary to get bits of the editor working correctly.

You also need to pull in the JSP Standard Tag Library. It’s not mandatory, but you won’t get far without it. The only trouble is that there are a gazillion different versions on the central repository with no clear clue as to which one should be used. This version appears to work OK. Importantly, it contains the taglib descriptors. Also, we set the scope to “runtime” as it’s not needed at compile time.

This gets you started. The other thing that you need is a correct web.xml. Different versions of the deployment descriptor get you different features in your JSP page. Go figure. Looking in the JSP spec right now, I can see §JSP.3.3.2:

The default mode for JSP pages in a Web Application delivered using a web.xml using the Servlet 2.3 or earlier format is to ignore EL expressions; this provides for backward compatibility.

The default mode for JSP pages in a Web Application delivered using a web.xml using the Servlet 2.4 format is to evaluate EL expressions with the ${} syntax. Expressions using the #{} are evaluated starting with JSP 2.1. See Section, “Backwards Compatibility with JSP 2.0” for more details on the evaluation of #{} expressions.

This caught me out for a while as I was trying to use the new syntax and it wasn’t getting interpolated. I want to use JSP 2.1, so I reckon it’s easiest to use servlet 2.5. That means I need a declaration that looks like this in my web.xml.

  
  
    …
  

Why was this a problem? Because the maven-archetype-webapp archetype generates a web.xml that looks like this.

  
  
    Archetype Created Web Application
  

Ooops. This issue was filed as ARCHETYPE-106 over a year ago. Fixing that would have made my life a lot easier.