Eclipse “cannot find the tag library descriptor” for custom tags (not JSTL!)

Question

I have a Java EE project which build fine with Ant, deploys perfectly to JBoss, and runs without any trouble. This project includes a few custom tag librari

Answer 1

This error can arise from several different sources. One case (not mentioned in other answers to this question) occurs when Eclipse does not implement the version of the JSP specification set in the TLD document. Eclipse releases typically lag behind up to a year in implementing newer servlet and JSP specifications. See this Eclipse bug for example.

In this case, your web application may run fine in the latest version of Tomcat, but Eclipse may still complain about a missing TLD. The short term solution (short of ignoring the error in Eclipse) is to bump down the JSP version to the one that your version of Eclipse supports.

Also, keep in mind the TLD version you are implementing. The tag names have changed slightly from v1.1 to v2.0 (i.e., info is now description on taglib and is not a valid element under tag, many of the element names now contain a hyphen). Eclipse has no tolerance for misspelled TLD tag names.

TLD 2.0 (jsp-version 2.0) Reference

TLD 2.1 (jsp-version 2.3) Reference