What is Expression Language (EL)? What’s its purpose?

It is a bad practice to put all the java code in your JSP Page. There was no solution to this problem before JSP Spec 2.0, to have Java code somewhere else and use some simple commands to invoke them.

EL has solved two of the major problems:

1. Web page designers don’t have to know java
2. Java code is JSP is hard to change and maintain.

With this new feature in JSP 2.0 you write java code somewhere else and call it using EL.

The purpose of EL is to offer a simpler way to invoke java code - that is residing some where in the Model component.