What is an Expression Language (EL...

What else can the EL do?

Say I have a Person JavaBean with a name property. It would have methods getName() and setName(String name). Also assume that an instance of this JavaBean lives in some scope such as session scope or application scope. The instance is bound to the variable name employee in one (or all) of these contexts. I could refer to the name property like this: ${employee.name}

If Name were a class instead of a simple String, I could make the expression longer to get to its parts:

First Name: ${employee.name.firstname}
Last Name: ${employee.name.lastname}

If I use this with a technology such as JSF, I can refer to it in a JSF tag like this:

<h:inputText value="#{employee.name}"/>

In this case, JSF is responsible for using the expression to retrieve the value of name when the page is displayed and set the value of name when the page is submitted.