The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Including the Tag Library Implementation

In addition to declaring the tag library, you also must make the tag library implementation available to the web application. There are several ways to do this. Tag library implementations can be included in a WAR in an unpacked format: Tag files are packaged in the /WEB-INF/tag/ directory, and tag handler classes are packaged in the /WEB-INF/classes/ directory of the WAR. Tag libraries already packaged into a JAR file are included in the /WEB-INF/lib/ directory of the WAR. Finally, an application server can load a tag library into all the web applications running on the server. For example, in the Application Server, the JSTL TLDs and libraries are distributed in the archive appserv-jstl.jar in as-install/lib/. This library is automatically loaded into the classpath of all web applications running on the Application Server, so you don’t need to add it to your web application.

The iterator tag library is implemented with tag handlers. Therefore, its implementation classes are packaged in the /WEB-INF/classes/ directory.