Tomcat 5.5 JSP EL evaluation: what?

From:
Owen Jacobson <angrybaldguy@google-email-service.example.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Wed, 03 May 2006 04:06:31 GMT
Message-ID:
<pan.2006.05.03.04.06.30.894891@google-email-service.example.com>
I'm working my way through the Sun J2EE tutorial, but I'm stuck on the
first web app.

I'm running the sample web app "hello1" on a stock tomcat 5.5
installation. The app theoretically demonstrates some simple JSTL
features and EL evaluation; instead, it demonstrates nothing at all.

My hello1.war contains:
/index.jsp
/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
/WEB-INF/web.xml
/WEB-INF/c.tld # from commons-taglib
/WEB-INF/fn.tld # ditto
/WEB-INF/lib/jstl.jar # the same
/WEB-INF/lib/standard.jar # likewise

index.jsp:
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/function" prefix="fn" %>
<html>
<head>
<title>Short, Simple Complete Compilable Code</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>${param.username}</p>
</body>
</html>

and web.xml:
<web-app>
  <display-name>hello1</display-name>
</web-app>

(This originally had a number of fields from the example web.xml; it
didn't work with those in place, either.)

From the tutorial and the JSTL docs, requesting
http://..../hello1/?username=Pennywise should print "Pennywise" on the
page. Instead, it's printing the expression itself: ${param.username}

Why?

And where is this documented? I tried the tomcat docs, the JSP
documentation, and google, with very little luck.

-Owen

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