The case for EL in Dolphin

If you're well connected to the JSF and Web Tier world, you'd know that the Expression Language used in JSF and JSP in Java EE 5 is slated to become a separate JSR. It is my hope, and the hope of several others, that this JSR be moved into the core JDK in the Dolphin timeframe.

I'd like to use the comments on this blog entry to gather use cases to justify the inclusion of the EL into the core JDK. I'll start off with some use-cases of mine, and some I collected from ##jsf.

• Make it easier for different frameworks, notably web frameworks, to interoperate

• Make it easier to write frameworks.

• Make performing Inversion of Control easier, reduce complexity of frameworks using IoC. IoC is not just for server apps. It can benefit desktop apps as well (look at Spring Rich Client).

• Be the underpinning of how Beans Binding links are specified.

• Could enable a markup based UI descriptions in Swing and allow for easily specifying links between ui components and their data models.

• Desktop applictions also have the notion of scope, but it goes beyond the normal "request/session/application", and it tends to be more specific to the application requirements itself. For example, when doing a sub-dialog, you're really entering into a scope. It would be nice to have a place to store model objects in that scope that would automatically go away when the dialog is dismissed. EL is a good way to do that.

Any others? I'm sure I'm just hitting the tip of the iceberg here.