JSTL woes

  • There's basically no online tag reference

Once you get past the initial hurdles, all you'll need is a reference manual, to check what attributes go with the tag and such. But the binary distribution of JSTL didn't come with such things, nor a Google search uncovers anything. I eventually found out this (http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/jstl/1.1/docs/tlddocs/index.html), but shouldn't this kind of documents come with the distribution by default?

  • No redistribution license terms in the distribution bundles

... so I can't figure out how I can redistribute jars/tlds

  • No "how to add JSTL to your war" document

The first thing you as the web-app builder would do is to bundle JSTL libs with your war file. But to my surprise none of the documents that come with the distribution explain this. (I eventually found http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/binarydist.html )

  • Why do I need to copy a .tld file, too?

Shouldn't the container be smart enough to look for that in the META-INF folder of a taglib jar file? I mean, those are always used in a pair, and I don't see any point in letting developers copy those into WEB-INF every time one wants to use taglibs.

The title says it all. Look at Jexel. And it's really awkward to invoke a method and put the result into the page attributes so that other EL expressions can access the value.
Because of this restriction, I can't even call List.size().