JSP :: Custom Tag Handlers - Classic Type

This is related to the book Head first JSP and Servlets 2nd edition. The books says that there are two types of custom tag handlers - Simple and classic. Classic tags are rarely used, so I'd like to skip them for now. I skipped a few pages related to classic and saw some new pages. I am not sure if these new pages are related to classic tags.

IterationTag lets you repeat the body When you write a tag handler that extends TagSupport, you get all the lifecycle methods from the Tag interface, plus the one method from IterationTag—doAfterBody(). Without doAfterBody(), you can’t iterate over the body because doStartTag() is too early, and doEndTag() is too late. But with doAfterBody(), your return value tells the Container whether it should repeat the body again (EVAL_BODY_AGAIN) or call the doEndTag() method (SKIP_BODY).

Default return values from TagSupport.If you don’t override the TagSupport lifecycle methods that return an integer, be aware of the default values the TagSupport method implementations return. The TagSupport class assumes that your tag doesn’t have a body (by returning SKIP_BODY) from do StartTag()), and that if you DO have a body that’s evaluated, you want it evaluated only once (by returning SKIP_BODY from doAfterBody()). It also assumes that you want the rest of the page to evaluate (by returning EVAL-PAGE from doEndtag()).