Jetty 7 hightide distribution, JSP and JSTL support

Question

I\'ve been struggling with Jetty 7 and its support for JSP and JSTL.

My JSP file:

<%@ page language=\"java\" contentType=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\"          


        

Answer 1

java.lang.AbstractMethodError: javax.servlet.jsp.PageContext.getELContext()Ljavax/el/ELContext;

This exception basically means that the mentioned method cannot be found in the runtime classpath, while it was available in the compiletime classpath of either the class or one of its dependencies.

This method is introduced in JSP 2.1 which gets hand in hand with Servlet 2.5. Since Jetty 7 is supposed to support Servlet 2.5 and thus isn't the suspect here, the only cause can be that the web.xml is declared as Servlet 2.4 or lower instead of Servlet 2.5. So, to fix this particular problem, you need to declare your web.xml as at least Servlet 2.5. The tag should look like this:

If that doesn't solve the problem, then the other cause is that the /WEB-INF/lib or even worse the /JRE/lib or /JRE/lib/ext is cluttered with appserver-specific libraries containing an older Servlet API version. E.g. servlet-api.jar from Tomcat or j2ee.jar or javaee.jar from Glassfish, etcetera. You'll need to clean up those classpath folders from any libraries which doesn't belong there, because they get precedence in classloading and will override the appserver's own libraries. Appserver-specific libraries belongs to the appserver in question, not to the webapp or JRE.

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That said and apart from the actual problem, the @page attributes language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=utf-8" are all superfluous. The language already defaults to Java and the contentType already defaults to text/html and the charset will already be set to UTF-8 if you set pageEncoding="UTF-8". So the following is already sufficient:

<%@page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>