Expression Language 3.0 feature functions

The Expression Language (EL) 3.0 feature provides full support for the EL 3.0 specification.

Descriptions of EL 3.0 functions are provided in the EL 3.0 specification and are not fully described here. However, some of the key enhancements include the following:

• EL 3.0 is now available as a separate feature and we can configure it independently of JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.3.

• Add support for Lambda expressions (value expression with parameters).

  See Section 1.20 of the EL 3.0 specification.

• Addition of operations on collections objects.

  See Chapter 2.0 of the EL 3.0 specification.

• New operators:
  • String concatenation.

    See section 1.8 of the EL 3.0 specification.

  • Assignment.

    See section 1.13 of the EL 3.0 specification.

  • Semi-colon.

    See section 1.14 of the EL 3.0 specification.

  • Field and Methods.

    See Section 1.22 of the EL 3.0 specification.

Important: There is a change in the EL 3.0 feature that might break existing applications. The default coercion for nulls to non-primitive types (except String) returns nulls. For example, a null that is coerced to a Double now returns a null value, whereas before it returned 0.0. The following code example describes this scenario:

Integer number=null;
factory.coerceToType(number, java.lang.Double.class)