Using JSTL, software developers and Web page authors can create robust, flexible Web applications more quickly and easily than ever before. Now, best-selling author and JSTL expert David Geary presents the definitive guide to JSTL: its built-in tags, powerful expression language, and extensibility. Through practical examples and extensive sample code, Geary demonstrates how JSTL simplifies, streamlines, and standardizes a wide range of common Web development tasks and helps you build Web applications far more easily than JavaServer Pages technology alone.

Key topics covered:

Building HTML forms; accessing form data, JavaBeans components (beans), collections, and maps; constructing URLs and importing their content; redirecting HTTP responses; iterating over collections of objects; handling errors

Localizing Web sites for multiple languages and countries, including localizing text and formatting and parsing numbers, currencies, percents, and dates.

Creating and accessing data sources, making queries and iterating over the results; performing database inserts, updates, and deletes; executing database transactions

Parsing XML documents; using XPath with JSTL custom actions; transforming XML with XSLT, filtering XML; accessing external entities