Problems with JSTL

what variable 'nickname' are you trying to output?
JSTL will use any named attribute from the pagecontext, not something you created in a Java block on the JSP (in fact you should avoid those like the plague).

yeah that is my problem. You are totaly right. So if i need variables i transfer from my servlet to my JSP <c:out... is not the right way? Should I use <%=.... instead?

When you reference ${nickname} from JSTL, what the JSP is doing is looking in either the request object for a nickname attribute or the session object [i.e., request.getAttribute("nickname")]. So if you want to use ${nickname} from JSTL but set it in your servlet, then do request.setAttribute("nickname", "My Nickname");

If you want to set values in the JSP, then use the <c:set> JSTL tag.

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.

To do this, make sure the top of your web.xml looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<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">

From the sound of things, this might actually be your problem, because if you're using a 2.3 style web.xml, then I don't think it will recognize the EL expressions. ${nickname} is an EL expression.

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).

This is a Tomcat-specific issue with the Apache JSTL implementation. If you don't use a 2.4 web.xml, the EL expressions don't get evaluated in the JSP.

Many thanks. Nice hint! Before anyone else gets insane one more hint: of course, you have to recompile all jsps to see it work after changing the web.xml.
a
find <docroot> -name "*.jsp" | xargs touch
will do the rest... ;-)

This is a Tomcat-specific issue with the Apache JSTL implementation. If you don't use a 2.4 web.xml, the EL expressions don't get evaluated in the JSP.

Be sure to never tell that to the 30 or so Tomcat instances running with our customers.