Adding a custom JSP tag to your JSP page
        
            I need to create a reusable "chunk" of JSP code
            and then add that code to any page where I need it

            I am going to create a converter from a java.time.LocalDate
            to java.util.Date, so the JSTL 
            <fmt:formatDate type="date" value="${now}" />
            tag will work
            
            steps:
            
            1) I need to create a new tag that looks like:
            
<%@ tag body-content="empty" pageEncoding="UTF-8" trimDirectiveWhitespaces="true" %>

<%@ taglib prefix="fmt" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>

<%@ attribute name="date" required="true" type="java.time.LocalDate" %>
<%@ attribute name="pattern" required="false" type="java.lang.String" %>

<c:if test="${empty pattern}">
    <c:set var="pattern" value="MM/dd/yyyy"/>
</c:if>

<fmt:parseDate value="${date}" pattern="yyyy-MM-dd" var="parsedDate" type="date"/>
<fmt:formatDate value="${parsedDate}" type="date" pattern="${pattern}" />  

      notice: the attributes, the first of type java.time.LocalDate, the
              second of type String.
              
              then my check it see if the pattern string is empty, and apply
              a default if is is
              
              finally I will convert the LocalDate to a String, then convert
              that String to a java.util.Date for the JSTL library can handle it
              
              
            2) I will need to save this new tag as a .tag file, and I want to
                put it somewhere the Browser cannot see it, but somewhere the JSP
                processor has access to, so I create a new folder under
                src/main/webapp/WEB-INF and name that folders tags
                my file is saved in this folder as localDate.tag
                
            3) Now I need to put this new tag into my JSP code, there are 2 steps
               to to this
               3.1) add the tag definition to the top of the page:
                    <%@ taglib prefix="tags" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags"%>
                    Note the tagdir= points to where I put the tag file
                    
               
               3.2) use this new tag prefix where I have a LocalDate that
                    I want formatted by the JSTL
                    <span id="orderDate">
                       <tags:localDate date="${order.orderDate}" pattern="MM-dd-yyyy"/>
                    </span>