Chapter 4 - Working with the Core Actions

Abstract

This chapter introduces the various functional areas provided in the Core Library. These include actions in the general-purpose, conditional, iteration, and URL-related areas. The Core tag library is a critical piece of the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL). The set of tags that are available in the Core tag library come into play for almost anything one may be doing in JavaServer Pages (JSPs). The Core area is composed of four distinct functional sections: general-purpose actions that encompass error handling and are also used to manipulate the scoped variables that might be found within a JSP; conditional actions used for doing conditional processing within a JSP; iterator actions that make it easy to iterate through collection of objects; URL-related actions for dealing with URL resources in a JSP.