The Howdy Glossary

The Jakarta Standard Tag Library (JSTL) is a set of tags and functions that enable the development of JSP pages without using scriptlets, which are blocks of Java code embedded within a page. By providing an easy-to-use standard set of tags for common tasks like iteration and conditional logic, JSTL promotes cleaner separation between presentation and business logic in web applications by encouraging developers to write reusable tag libraries instead of embedding raw Java code into their JSP files. This library includes the core library for basic scripting elements; the XML library, which provides support for manipulating XML documents; the internationalization library for handling locale-sensitive issues; and the SQL tag extension library, allowing interaction with databases directly from JSP pages.