Head First Servlets and JSP, 2nd Edition

Imagine you want your JSP to roll dice

You’ve decided it would be awesome to have a web-based dice-rolling service. That way, instead of hunting around behind desks and in the sofa cushions for real dice, a user could just go to your web page, click on the virtual dice, and voila! They roll! (Of course, you have no idea that a Google search will probably bring up, oh, about 4,420 sites that do this.)

1. Write a Java class with a public static method.

   This is just a plain old Java class. The method MUST be public and static, and it can have arguments. It should (but isn’t required to) have a non-void return type. After all, the whole point is to call this from a JSP and get something back that you can use as part of the expression or to print out.

   Put the class file in the /WEB-INF/classes directory structure (matching the appropriate package directory structure, just like you would with any other class).

2. Write a Tag Library Descriptor (TLD) file.

   For an EL function, the TLD provides a mapping between the Java class that defines the function and the JSP that calls the function. That way, the function name and the actual method name can be different. You might be stuck with a class with a really stupid method name, for example, and maybe you want to provide a more obvious or intuitive name to page designers using EL. No problem—the TLD says, “This is the Java class, this is the method signature for the function (including return type) and this is the name we’ll use in EL expressions”. In ...