While testing an application against the current AS trunk, I noticed that if a JSP file, in a web application, contains an EL expression then it is not evaluated unless I explicitly set el-ignored to false (in jsp-config of web.xml) or set isELIgnored to false in the page directive of the JSP. My web application does not have a web.xml and the deployment is by default (correctly) considered as a 3.0 web app. As per the JSP 2.2 spec, section JSP.3.3.2, Table JSP.3-1, I see that EL expressions are by default expected to be evaluated for web applications of 3.0 version.