JSTL

The JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) was developed to encapsulate common functionality, such as conditionals and iteration, into reusable actions.

The tags rely on an external dependency, so you must add them to your pom.xml.

<dependency>
  <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
  <artifactId>jstl</artifactId>
  <version>1.2</version>
</dependency>

This is in addition to the javax.servlet-api dependency.

<dependency>
 <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
 <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
 <version>3.1.0</version>
</dependency>

To use the tags, you must add the taglib directive to your JSP page to specify the tag library uri and prefix.

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>

We can combine the tags with JSP EL to change what our pages display.