The JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) just entered its Public Review stageunder the Java Community Process, and Beta 1 of the reference implementation (RI) is now available through Jakarta Taglibs.

This new draft spec and RI milestone solidifies JSTL in a number of respects. After a lot of productive deliberation, the expert group determined the syntax for a single expression language; gone are the vaguely documented, pluggable languages.

We've also introduced a few new minor tags and made many tags more flexible and robust. This release includes improved support for all of JSTL's features: support for iteration, conditional logic, URL management (including URL-based information retrieval), XML manipulation, database access, text formatting, and internationalization.

The RI (Beta 1) is available at:

  http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-taglibs/releases/standard/

You can read the JSTL public draft at:

  http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr052

does this mean that the struts tag libs and jakarta stand alone tag libs will be integrated? I've have to rip out tag libs from struts and use em because the jakarta ones were lacking. Would it make sense to make the struts tag libs a subset of the jakarta tags?

I think quite a few struts tags are tightly tied to MVC architecture that struts promotes. Hence, I wonder whether this is a possibility at all. However what I anticipate is that all these technologies like struts JSTL etc will somehow converge under Java Server Faces.

Developers for Jakarta Struts and Jakarta Taglibs will likely encourage their users to use JSTL in areas where functionality currently overlaps. I can't speak for Struts directly, but I'm a committer at Taglibs, and the consensus there seems to be to treat each taglib individually: some may be deprecated, while others might be modified to integrate well with JSTL.

Shawn Bayern
(JSTL reference-implementation lead)

Wow, Have you see the members of this JSR : Craig and Jon, to only speak of them, are the "frères enemis" for years. Put these two guys in a room and you can be sure you will get something great.
A JSR to remember !

I think JSTL and JSP spec is faraway when compared with ASP.NET tags.

Care for your keywords pls