I'm attempting to create a custom jsp tag. Everything is working fine, except for the fact that I the request seems to be out-of-scope for my custom function.

Here is the relevant bit from the .tag file:

<%!
private  String process(String age, BigDecimal amount)
        {
//Attempting to access request here results in an compile time error trying to:
String url=request.getURL;
        }
%>

I'm very new to JSP so I'm sure I'm missing something obvious..but I can't seem to figure out what. Any help is appreciated.