As a frequent contributor to the Spring Framework user forums, I have noticed a common trend among people new to Spring MVC - they really don’t understand how to use JSTL and EL in their Spring-driven JSPs.
Although Spring MVC supports flexibility in choosing a view technology, in my [back of the napkin] estimate, at least 80% of the time it is paired with JSP and JSTL. Unfortunately, since JSP was pushed out about 4-5 years ago, a lot of the information that you find on the web is extremely dated, often going back to JSTL 1.0 syntax (or, gasp, using scriptlets!). In this article I’ll clear up the confusion around how to use JSTL with various app servers and webapp versions.
Continue reading “How to Reference and Use JSTL in your Web Application”
File this one under “silly me”. I was having a heck of a time getting Eclipse 3.3 to find the Glassfish plugin automatically (or even manually) as described in the install guide.
I am sometimes behind a corporate proxy server, but I had the proxy set up in Eclipse when I was trying this, and I was seeing other app servers show up in the “Download additional server adapters” dialog.
Turns out that about half of the server adapter sites serve up their updates via HTTP (Geronimo, IBM, Pramati, and Eclipse proper). The rest use HTTPS (BEA, Glassfish, SAP). This can be determined by opening org.eclipse.wst.server.ui_1.0.205.v20070912.jar, or the equivalent on your version of Eclipse/WTP, and looking at serverAdapterSites.xml. For the curious, you can view the contents of this file in the Eclipse CVS repository.
All I had to do once I figured this out was to update my Eclipse proxy settings to use the same proxy for HTTPS that I was using for HTTP. It’s unfortunate that one doesn’t get any error or warning messages when this happens!
Hopefully this helps anyone else trying to get this installed from behind a proxy.
