What are tag libraries?
Tag libraries, or taglibs, are a feature of JSP 1.1 that enables you to build libraries of reusable JSP tags. That means you can encapsulate common behavior in your own JSP tag and use it across the JSP pages in your Web apps. The ability to extract common functionality from a JSP page and easily reuse it in other pages and Web applications can be very powerful. But isn’t that what JavaBeans were designed for? JavaBeans are reusable software components. It’s true that there are JSP tags that let you use JavaBeans within your pages. The only ability those tags allow you, however, is to bind named, scoped instances, and then get/set those instances’ properties. If you need to call methods on your JavaBeans, you need to embed the appropriate Java code inside a scriptlet.
