TOMEE-4651 - register the jakarta.tags.* TLD URIs

[jungm]

What

Registers the seven Jakarta Tags 3.0 taglib URIs (jakarta.tags.core, .fmt, .sql, .xml, .functions, .permittedTaglibs, .scriptfree) so JSP pages can actually use them.

Why

Jakarta Tags 3.0 renamed the JSTL taglib URIs from the legacy http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/* form to the short jakarta.tags.* form.

The taglibs-standard implementation we shade in deps/taglibs-shade predates that rename. The shade only rewrites bytecode (javax.servlet → jakarta.servlet); it does not touch the TLD descriptors, so the shipped TLDs still declare the legacy URIs only. Confirmed by inspecting the jar — none of its 12 TLDs contains a jakarta.tags.* URI.

The result is that any page containing

<%@ taglib uri="jakarta.tags.core" prefix="c" %>

fails at JSP compile time. This breaks the entire Jakarta Tags 3.0 TCK, and the EJB Lite JSP vehicles as a side effect since their shared harness imports the same URI.

How

TomEETldScanner already pre-populates the TLD cache with the container's own taglibs so they don't have to be parsed on every deployment. This adds the Jakarta Tags URIs as additional keys for those same resources, plus widens the permittedTaglibs validator so a page guarded by that TLV may use either spelling.

Two details worth a reviewer's attention:

• The aliases reuse the very same TldResourcePath instance rather than constructing new ones. scanPlatform() tells myfaces and jstl entries apart by reference identity on the resource path's URL, and TLD_RESOURCE_TAG_LIB is keyed on it. Both are load-bearing and commented in the code.
• The aliasing lives outside the dumped data block, keeping hand-written logic separate from the pasted TLD metadata. It is a no-op when JSTL is absent (JSTL_URL == null), degrading to normal scanning rather than failing.

I also corrected the class-level comment. It claimed the file is "generated so we don't really care", which is misleading: there is no generator in the build. The data was dumped once by the sysout() method kept commented out at the bottom of the same file and pasted in, and the file has been hand-edited several times since. That sysout() is itself stale — it still recognises JSTL entries by the taglibs-standard-jstlel jar name whereas the shipped jar is taglibs-shade-*.jar — so it can no longer reproduce the file. The new comment says so.

Considered and rejected

Switching to a Jakarta-native implementation (org.glassfish.web:jakarta.servlet.jsp.jstl:3.0.1) would be the more principled fix — it ships both namespaces, keeps the same org.apache.taglibs.standard.* packages, and self-shades Xalan. Apache Taglibs itself never released a Jakarta version (1.2.5 is still latest), which is why the shade exists at all. But the swap touches ~40 sites across BOMs, assembly descriptors, jarsToSkip patterns and jar-name filters, so it does not belong in a bug fix. Probably worth its own issue.

Testing

Unit tests in TomEETldScannerJakartaTagsTest cover the alias mapping, legacy URIs still resolving, the validator widening, idempotency, and the no-JSTL no-op. Note these drive the aliasing against a synthetic resource map via reflection, because the shaded taglibs jar is not on that module's test classpath.

The real proof is the TCK. Built the plume distro, confirmed the fix is in the shipped tomee-catalina jar, and ran the Jakarta EE 11 Web Profile TCK tags partition from apache/tomee-tck with the exclusion lifted:

	Before	After
Tags suite	all 50 classes fail JSP compilation	541 tests, 482 passing, 0 taglib resolution errors
JSTL 1.0 compatibility class	37 of 38 methods fail	33 of 38 pass
Tags partition, non-TLD gaps excluded	—	381 tests, 0 failures, 0 errors
EJB Lite JSP vehicles	HTTP 500 before EJB assertions run	9 of 9 ClientEjblitejspTest green

The shipped jar's c.tld still declares only <uri>http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core</uri>, so the fact that jakarta.tags.core pages now compile can only come from this change.

The 8 classes still failing are unrelated to TLD registration: the five sql/* classes and the compatibility class hit SQLSyntaxErrorException: Table/View 'JSTL_TAB1' does not exist (the harness never creates those Derby tables), and xmlcore.parse / xtransform.transform fail resolving an external systemId. A matching tomee-tck change narrows exclusions/tags.txt to just those.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code