J2EE™ Tutorial, The

Defining Tags

To define a tag, you need to:

• Develop a tag handler and helper classes for the tag

• Declare the tag in a tag library descriptor

This section describes the properties of tag handlers and TLDs and explains how to develop tag handlers and library descriptor elements for each type of tag introduced in the previous section.

Tag Handlers

A tag handler is an object invoked by a Web container to evaluate a custom tag during the execution of the JSP page that references the tag. Tag handlers must implement either the Tag or BodyTag interface. Interfaces can be used to take an existing Java object and make it a tag handler. For newly created handlers, you can use the TagSupport and BodyTagSupport classes as base classes. These classes and ...