The Jakarta Commons Team is pleased to announce the first official release of Commons EL from the Apache Software Foundation. Commons EL provides an interpreter for the Expression Language that is part of the JavaServer Pages(TM) specification, version 2.0. This release fully implements the javax.servlet.jsp.el package.

Read about Commons EL:
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/el.html

Is EL going to live basically on the JSP tier, or will people start to embed it in many other places (and become more like Velocity?

I would certenly like the other (to have standart templating language with standard embeded expression laguage to be used outside of servlet container).

For example, consider simple and very common case: you need to send an e-mail from your site and the content of the e-mail is dynamic and needs to be generated. How this should be done from J2EE server using standard specs and API's ?

a) Use JSP and URLConnection to connectd back to the servlet container? This doesn't seem too smart.

b) Use some Writer and 'println' content? Not so elegant nor readable.

c) Use some templating engine like Velocity to generate content? This is the best option so far, but not standard.

I don't see any reason to tie JSTL and EL to servlet container.

Mileta

Does anyone know how I would go about integrating Commons-EL with Struts so that I don't have to use those 'struts-el' tag libraries?

Actually, JSP 2.0 is going to solve that problem for you already. You'll be able to use EL expressions everywhere (even in static template text), not just in JSTL tags that know about them. So, I can't see a lot of value in trying to integrate libraries like this into Struts tags directly.

Craig McClanahan

I wonder how EL and JEXL (both from jakarta commons) are related. Both are JSTL implementations - with JEXL claiming to add further "extensions".

anyone?

Christian

EL is intended to be the reference implementation of the JSP expression language and as such will only implement the spec and no more.

Jexl is an extension of the JSP expression language which adds some extra features from Velocity such as method invocations and such like. Right now Maven & Jelly both use Jexl as the default expression language which is pretty much the same as Velocity.

James
Core Developers Network

Guys,

Take a look at http://www.ognl.org.

WebWork2 will use their OGNL Expression Evaluator.

Commons EL looks quite nice, so I want to use it. But nothing in the distribution that I've found gives me any information on how to install it. What am I missing?

I'm running Tomcat 5, Struts, etc. It would appear that Commons EL came pre-installed in Tomcat 5, but trying to use even the simplest ${...} doesn't seem to work. What is a good "Hello World" ${...} construct I can use to see if I have EL support in my Tomcat/JSP installation?

Any help is much appreciated!

place
<%@page isELIgnored="false"%>
and try..