public static final

What Seam (and its Extended EL) could do a long time ago standard EL can do now, too: calling methods with parameters. Assuming you have the following bean:

public class MyBean {
 public String sayHello(final String name){
  return "Hello "  + name;
 }
}

If you put <h:outputText value=”#{myBean.sayHello(‘Daniel’)}”/> somewhere in your JSF page the output ist not a TargetInvocationException or a MethodNotFoundException but indeed a “Hello Daniel”. But with one precondition: you have to use Facelets and not JSP (which should already do). Why is described by Ryan Lubke.

If you’re using Tomcat 6 be aware that it brings its own el-api.jar so you have to replace it in the lib folder.

UPDATE: As admitted in the comments I hadn’t tested the stuff I wrote above. The steps described here aren’t enough, so I’m writing it again so that it works.

1. Download the two SNAPSHOT jars (el-api and el-ri) from the location posted in Ryan’s blog entry
2. Put el-api-2.1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar into <tomcat root>/lib and remove the existing el-api.jar (please make an backup)
3. Put el-impl-2.1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar into the WEB-INF/lib folder of your webapp (or let Maven do this for you )
4. An now the most important part: Tell JSF to use the ExpressionFactory of the RI by adding the following lines to the web.xml:

   <context-param>
    <param-name>com.sun.faces.expressionFactory</param-name>
    <param-value>com.sun.el.ExpressionFactoryImpl</param-value>
   </context-param>
   

I missed number 4 so JSF always uses org.apache.el.ExpressionFactoryImpl as the default ExpressionFactory. But if you follow these 4 steps everything should work. At least it works for me (Mojarra 2.0.1 and Tomcat 6.0.20).