Adding JSTL/JSP EL to your web applicaton (updated)

Quite some environments do not come with JSTL: Eclipse for JEE (Galileo), Tomcat 6, Jetty 6... Follow these steps to add them:

1. Add JSTL
   Grab the JSTL API (jstl-api.jar) and JSTL implementation (jstl-impl-1.2.jar).
   Add the jars to your Container (e.g. Tomcat) lib directory (or your webapp lib).
   Alternatively add them using maven dependencies:
   

   <dependency>
     <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
     <artifactId>jstl</artifactId>
     <version>1.2</version>
   </dependency>
   

2. Make sure the web-app root element in web.xml supports at least servlet 2.4/JSP 2.0

   <web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee
    http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd" version="2.4">

   If you use <taglib> elements in web.xml, make sure they are embedded in a <jsp-config> element.

Wikileaks: free speech to the test

As much as I understand that the US wants to protect its confidential information, incidents like these are a good test for democratic values. After all there's a lot of criticism on China. But just how much better are other regimes?

• Wikileaks got bumped from US Amazon cloud servers. A good indication of inherent risks of control one has when running cloud based services.
• Wikileaks was also removed from French servers. Because France does not want confidential diplomatic information of other coutnries to be available. I doubt that France is applying this as a general rule to all diplomatic information from all countires.
• Wikileaks was removed from DNS provider EveryDNS, because it breached the terms of contract. The ongoing denial of service attacks against the site were compromising the service for other clients. Instead of giving good service and protection and going after the attackers, the service provider says the customer is in error? Fun: now botnets can remove all EveryDNS customers by picking them as a DOS target.
• Paypal (a subsidiary of US based eBay) blocks donations for WikiLeaks because they do not transfer money for criminal activities. The strange thing about these actions by US companies is that they are based on private company regulations rather than public law.