If you find yourself in the position of trying to use the JSTL but having in completely fail to do anything at all then you probably have the same problem I struggled with for a few hours the other day.

Now that I come to recount the problem I feel more than a little daft but here goes: I forgot to include standard.jar along with jstl.jar in the classpath. Yep it's that simple.

The symptoms of not having standard.jar installed are a total failure of anything in the JSTL tag libraries working. The problem is that I, and everyone else who has been caught out by this, immediatly assumes that there is something more profound wrong. I was checking every other aspect of my setup sure as the syntax of the tags, the name space decleration, etc ,etc. Of course the name space doesn't have to point to anything so the JSTL tags compiled fine - they just didn't do anything.

I think a solution to this problem would be to rename standard.jar something like jstl-standard.jar. That would mean that it would index next to jstl.jar and not be forgotten as often. I missed it because I was "borrowing" the libraries from another project and I forgot standard.jar belonged with jstl.jar.