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