Tomcat 5.5 problem with JRE 1.5 (Xalan and jstl 1.1 problem with transformer)

[Valeria Pesce <va...@email.it>]

Hello everyone,
I hope someone in this list can help me with this.
 
I developed a simple XML based document repository using JSTL xml tags 1.0
under Tomcat 4.0.
Now I am trying to do the same with Tomcat 5.5.12 using JSTL 1.1 but I keep
receiving an error message about the instantiation of the transformer:
 
javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactoryConfigurationError: Provider
org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl could not be instantiated:
java.lang.InstantiationException:
org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl

This is my test environment:
- Windows XP
- JRE 1.5.0
- Tomcat 5.5.12
- A CMS compliant with Tomcat 5 and coming with JSTL 1.1 libraries
(InfoGlue: www.infoglue.org)

I see JRE 1.5.0 contains an internal version of xalan and xerces and
apparently I cannot override them.

I did the following to overcome the problem:
- download the latest versions of xalan.jar, xercesImpl.jar and 
xml-apis.jar and place them under the WEB-inf directory of my application
- place the same files under [TOMCAT_HOME]/common/endorsed
- place the same files under [JAVA_HOME]/lib/endorsed

This is my very simple transformer page (very very basic):
 
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/xml" prefix="x" %>
<c:import var="xmlText" url="${requestScope.xmlUrl}" />
<c:import var="xslText" url="${requestScope.xslUrl}" />
<c:catch var="ex">
  <x:transform xslt="${xslText}" doc="${xmlText}"></x:transform>
</c:catch>
<c:if test="${not empty ex}">
  <c:out value="${ex}" />
</c:if>
 
The request-scoped variables contain what they should (I tested them 
importing directly to the page without storing the imported contents in 
variables).
 
I really don't know what else to try.
 
Thank you to those who had the patience to read and to those who will be 
so kind to reply...
 
Valeria