What is JSP Expression Language and what are it’s benefits?

Most of the times we use JSP for view purposes and all the business logic is present in servlet code or model classes. When we receive client request in servlet, we process it and then add attributes in request/session/context scope to be retrieved in JSP code. We also use request params, headers, cookies and init params in JSP to create response views.

We can use scriptlets and JSP expressions to retrieve attributes and parameters in JSP with java code and use it for view purpose. But for web designers, java code is hard to understand and that’s why JSP Specs 2.0 introduced Expression Language (EL) through which we can get attributes and parameters easily using HTML like tags.

Expression language syntax is ${name} and we can use EL implicit objects and EL operators to retrieve the attributes from different scopes and use them in JSP page.