[ANNOUNCE] JSP 2.1 and Faces 1.2 Public Review

Question

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Public Review
of the next versions of the specification for JavaServer Pages (JSP)
and JavaServer Faces (Faces). JSP 2.1 is developed under JSR-245 and
Faces 1.2 is developed under JSR-252. The two expert groups are working
ogether to improve the alignment between these two powerful web presentation
technologies.
Building on the work that was accomplished with the Early Draft
Review, this Public Review covers two additional areas that required
better integration between JSP and Faces:
- Tree Creation and Content Interweaving
- Deferred expressions nested within iteration tags
Please see Appendix E of the JSP spec and the
Preface of the Faces spec to see details of what's changed.
To access the specifications:
JSP 2.1 PR (JSR-245)
http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/pr/jsr245/
Faces 1.2 PR (JSR-252)
http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/pr/jsr252/
Sincerely,
The JSR-245 and JSR-252 Expert Groups

Answer 1

Can you confirm reports that the Unified EL is still not going to allow method calls on Java objects?
This has had a major impact on Joda-Time http://joda-time.sourceforge.net (a replacement for all the date and calendar classes in the JDK). The JSP and JSF specs expect to get all of their date objects as java.util.Date. However, our classes do not extend Date, but instead provide a toDate() method for easy conversion. However, with the EL being so restrictive it cannot call the toDate() method, causing no end of trouble.
The mailing list thread is here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=7037421&forum_id=8530
It really is incredibly narrow minded to block method calls from the EL. Joda-Time is just one of many projects that would benefit from allowing method calls. As it is, I will probably have to pollute the Joda-Time library by providing a getAsDate() method, which is frankly crap.