How to switch to a different JSP / EL implementation with WebLogic 10g?

Question

Hi everyone,
we have a web application (JSP + servlets), that runs fine on Tomcat 5.5. We are porting it to WebLogic 10g3 - we've solved all of the issues except one. Some of the EL expressions are processes correctly in Tomcat, but it fails in WebLogic.
For example we have a custom tag (component inherited from a SimpleTag), that renders a combobox. The component has "textExpression" attribute, that it evaluated like
String text = (String) pageContext.getExpressionEvaluator().evaluate(textExpr, String.class, pageContext.getVariableResolver(), null);
but if the expression has two parts - i.e. something like "{...} {...}" - the parse fails, for example with the following exception:
javax.servlet.jsp.el.ELParseException: Error occured while trying to parse '${(option.partner.jmeno eq null && option.partner.prijmeni eq null && option.partner.nazevSpolecnostiFoPo ne null) ? option.partner.nazevSpolecnostiFoPo : option.partner.jmeno } ${(option.partner.jmeno eq null && option.partner.prijmeni eq null && option.partner.nazevSpolecnostiFoPo ne null) ? '' : option.partner.prijmeni}'
weblogic.jsp.internal.jsp.el.ExpressionEvaluatorImpl.parseEL(ExpressionEvaluatorImpl.java:171)
weblogic.jsp.internal.jsp.el.ExpressionEvaluatorImpl.parseExpression(ExpressionEvaluatorImpl.java:134)
weblogic.jsp.internal.jsp.el.ExpressionEvaluatorImpl.evaluate(ExpressionEvaluatorImpl.java:125)
Is it possible to switch the JSP / EL engine to Jasper? I'd expect some property pointing to ExpressionEvaluator implementation / parameter in the deployment descriptor but I haven't found anything like that yet.
thanks
Tomas

Answer 1

Anyway I've achieved some progress with the Jasper - I've found that when precompiled using the JspC compiler from Jasper package, the resulting servlets are inherited from org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase and thus should probably use the "proper" JSP EL implementation. But I still can't use these servlets from Weblogic, as I receive java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl.
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl
     at org.apache.jsp.WEB_002dINF.jsp.servletExceptionFragment_jsp._jspService(servletExceptionFragment_jsp.java:64)
     at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:97)
     at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:820)
     at weblogic.servlet.internal.StubSecurityHelper$ServletServiceAction.run(StubSecurityHelper.java:227)
     at weblogic.servlet.internal.StubSecurityHelper.invokeServlet(StubSecurityHelper.java:125)
     at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.execute(ServletStubImpl.java:292)
     at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.execute(ServletStubImpl.java:175)
     at weblogic.servlet.internal.RequestDispatcherImpl.invokeServlet(RequestDispatcherImpl.java:502)
     at weblogic.servlet.internal.RequestDispatcherImpl.forward(RequestDispatcherImpl.java:251)
     at org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceView.renderMergedOutputModel(InternalResourceView.java:145)
     at org.springframework.web.servlet.view.AbstractView.render(AbstractView.java:251)
     at org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.render(DispatcherServlet.java:1144)
     at org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doDispatch(DispatcherServlet.java:880)
The servlet is compiled properly, the jasper-runtime.jar is in the WEB-INF/lib directory, yet the weblogic is not able to load the PageContextImpl class :-(
Edited by: user6510516 on 25.2.2009 4:14