Are you using JSTL as you should?

"Java is indeed very powerful, flexible and scalable, but it is pretty hard to do simple things with it!" " is far more practical to this job than Java" "We should only use Java to more complex tasks" "There is no point in using Java if your product is going to be small" Have you ever heard any of these sentences before? You probably have. And I have to agree some things are just too hard to do using plain J2EE out-of-the-box web components - I mean, using JSP/Servlets only.

When it comes to most web applications requirements, it is been just unnecessarily too difficult to implement simple stuff. But this dark era has come to an end with JSTL.

JSTL is a set of tag libraries, some validators and a cool feature that also is going to be part of JSP 2.0, the Expression Language - EL - which will improve your productivity considerably. Accessing complex bean structures, handling logical expressions, looping through arrays, collections etc., processing XML, executing SQL instructions in transactions and more - all those things are made easy by JSTL. Although some features are debatable - tags that allow you to execute SQL code inside your JSPs, for example - they can be used for some useful purposes - prototyping, for example.

For example, a few weeks ago, someone asked me how hard it would be to connect to a URL, forward a few parameters, read back the result stream and display the data returned to the user. My first thought was to say it would take a few lines of code and a couple of minutes to write and test, but then I remembered the tag from JSTL. Well, it took seconds to write and test! That is a productivity boost! Writing reliable, tested Java code in seconds - that is something your IT manager would like to hear :-)

So, if you don't know JSTL, go to URL above or visit http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/jstl/ if you want to know more about it. Believe me, you should :-).