The Xephyrus Data Structures Tag Library (das) provides an easy way to create and manipulate the contents of common Java data-structures such as maps and lists using JSP tags.

For most JSP 1.2+ web application servers, such as Tomcat 5, you only need to place the das tag library jar file in the WEB-INF/lib directory of your web application. Most servers will automatically load the taglib URI defined in the jar file. In other words, just do this:

• Copy the tag library JAR file (taglib-datastructs.jar) to the /WEB-INF/lib subdirectory of your web application.

If you happen to have a web application server for which this does not work, follow these steps to set up a hard-link to the taglib URI:

• Copy the tag library descriptor file (datastructs.tld) to the /WEB-INF/tld subdirectory of your web application.
• Copy the tag library JAR file (taglib-datastructs.jar) to the /WEB-INF/lib subdirectory of your web application.
• Add a <taglib> element to your web application deployment descriptor in /WEB-INF/web.xml that looks like this:
  <taglib> <taglib-uri>http://www.xephyrus.com/taglib-datastructs</taglib-uri> <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tld/xephyrus-taglib-datastructs.tld</taglib-location> </taglib>

To use the tags from this library in your JSP pages, add the following directive at the top of each page:

To build this critter, the following libraries are required:

• A JDK 1.5 compiler. I prefer Sun's JDK⇒ at the moment.
• A JSP 2.0 provider. I did my testing on Tomcat 5⇒.
• Apache Ant 1.6⇒ or later.
• JUnit 3.8.1⇒ or later.
• MockRunner 0.3.5⇒ or later.
• JDom 1.0⇒ or later.

Once those are in place, put yourself in the base directory of the uncompressed taglib-datastructs project tree and use ant to build. The following ant rules are available:

That's pretty much it.