The most important thing about getting JSTL to work, and is documented almost no where, is you have to use a Servlet 2.4 style web.xml instead of a Servlet 2.3 style web.xml.
Wrong, dead wrong.
You need a 2.4 servlet container ONLY to use JSTL 1.1. The questions are clearly related to JSTL 1.0 which is part of the 2.3 spec (though may need separate installation of the JSTL jars depending on appserver in use).
As people are clearly allowed to attack me but I'm not allowed to defend myself, I no longer post to this site.