The uri is not a required field in the tld right, and we can actually refer to the tld in the taglib directive (in the jsp page) by its relative path or from the context root '/' . I just have another thing to report to you on this, the problem I have is not reproducible. I went into work the day after, and created a custom tag. that works fine. I suppose this is out and out a verison issue or I am missing some jars in my classpath. What do you think . Please can you check the exception and tell me if there is something that we have missed out on, coz I could get nothing.