I found the problem: (using glassfish-embedded-all-3.0.1-b01.jar)
The embedded jar contains a number of tld files in the META-INF directory. Some of these tld contained tags like
<!DOCTYPE taglib
PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD JSP Tag Library 1.2//EN"
"
http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-jsptaglibrary_1_2.dtd">
For reasons I do not fully understand, all these tld's are parsed when a WAR containing a single ref to a tld is deployed.
The xerces parser trying to parse these tlds causes a failure since it can't reach java.sun.com in offline mode.
I removed all the DOCTYPE tags and now everything is working in offline mode.
- Johan
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