JSTL 1.0: Standardizing JSP, Part 1 (O'Reilly)
June 11, 2002 started a new phase for JSP developers. That's when the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.0 specification was released. The Apache Taglibs project followed up with a reference implementation a few days later. JSTL answers developers' demand for a set of standardized JSP custom actions to handle the tasks needed in almost all JSP pages, including conditional processing, internationalization, database access, and XML processing."