After digging around the web, I found a number of points to check…

• Check you application server supports JSP 2.0 or above (Tomcat 5.0 and higher does)
• Check your web.xml descriptor file is using at least version 2.4 of the Servlet deployment descriptor (I have been using 2.5). If it is using Servlet 2.3 spec or earlier, EL will be disabled by default.
• Even if you are using version 2.5 of the Servlet deployment descriptor, make sure that the schemaLocation is correct. For example, I copied this from somewhere on the web and it failed to work:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
  <web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
           xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
           xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee
              http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
           Version="2.5">

  I then found this version, which does work correctly. Note the subtle difference in the schema location of j2ee vs javaee.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
           <web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
           xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
           xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
               http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
           version="2.5">  

  I found the above here at Oracle.

• As a last resort, you can use <%@ page isELIgnored="false" %> in your JSP, but having to do this is usually a sign that something else may be wrong (as described above).

Related posts:

• XML Schema for the Servlet 2.5 deployment descriptor[java.sun.com]
• Java EE 5 – Unified Expression Language[oracle.com]
• JSP, JSTL, Servlet and Tomcat version matching[coderanch.com]
• Stack Overflow related problem postings:
• EL in a JSP stopped evaluating[stackoverflow.com]
• JSP: EL expression is not evaluated[stackoverflow.com]
• Javascript String.replace works weirdly in jsp file[stackoverflow.com]

]]> http://www.shaunabram.com/jsp-el-not-evaluated/feed/ 0 http://www.shaunabram.com/jee/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jee http://www.shaunabram.com/jee/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:05:02 +0000 admin http://www.shaunabram.com/?p=14 So what exactly is Java Enterprise Edition?

Although I am a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect, and have worked with much of the J2EE family, I thought that with all the recent changes introduced in the latest version, JEE 5, it was worth writing a short article giving an overview of JEE to remind me of where it all stands.

See JEE.

Update: I just saw this posting on TheServerSide related to the upcoming JEE 6 release…

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