After the first release candidate of JEXL languished in the wild for more than a week, without any significant comments, Jakarta Commons JEXL 1.0 is out. Jakarta Commons JEXL 1.0 includes support for ant-style properties.

As Dion Gillard (one of the JEXL committers) put it, "JEXL has been sitting around for some time". A few projects (such as Jelly) use it, but more would use it if it were fully released. How many of you, in theserverside community, have used JEXL in your projects. What in your opinion should drive the JEXL roadmap?

Release: Jakarta Commons JEXL 1.0

I hope that some JEXL features will be included in furture JSP EL specs:
a) Support for invocation of any accessible method
b) '+' has been overloaded to be use as a String concatenation operator

But also I find that some of the JEXL features are 'unnecessary complications' (overengeneering):
a) Added a general size() method
We do not need general size() method when we alredy have direct method invocation. In fact, this only artificaially adds size() method to java.lang.String, because java.util.Map and java.util.List already have it.
b) Optional syntax for the 'empty' function : empty(obj)
Why do we need two syntaxes for 'empty' function? I do not find that the either is more readable then the another.

MC

We have been using JEXL in a our software. The best thing about it, is that it does exactly what we expected it to do. Thanks a lot, great job guys!

JEXL is one of those projects that has not gained a lot of publicity, but is extremely useful.
I see the documentation has improved with the JEXL reference. This will be helpful as previously I had to look through the JUnit tests to figure out what it could do.
Keep up the great work!