Conclusions

In this chapter, you looked behind the curtain at the inner workings of the Struts tag libraries. You found that not only is understanding the inner workings of the tag libraries not difficult, it also gives you valuable insight into how the rest of Struts works.

I highly recommend that, after completing this chapter, you take some time to review other Struts tags directly in the Struts source code itself. Be sure to review the Java source code, the TLD file entries for the tag, and the tag usage as defined in the Struts documentation.

It is important that you learn how to figure out what a tag is doing if you have trouble using it. That knowledge will enable you to code and debug faster, and make maintaining your pages easier.

The Struts tags are a set of well-developed JSP custom tags that were developed by the authors of Struts to make the job of the JSP developer easier. Another set of tag libraries with this same goal is the Java standard tag library (JSTL). JSTL is governed by JSR-052 and provides multiple tag libraries, is hosted with the container itself, and provides a basic expression language.