jsp - Unable to locate the EL RI expression factory

Question

I am getting the following exception in my application.

com.sun.faces.config.ConfigurationException: It appears the JSP version of the container is older than 2.1 and unable to locate the EL RI expression factory, com.sun.el.ExpressionFactoryImpl. If not using JSP or the EL RI, make sure the context initialization parameter, com.sun.faces.expressionFactory, is properly set.

How to set the EL details in the web.xml.

Answer 1

The exception is telling that JSP 2.1 is required. You need to ensure that your web.xml is declared as Servlet 2.5 or newer, and that your servletcontainer supports it (Tomcat 6, Glassfish 2, JBoss AS 5, etc, or newer). JSP 2.1 goes hand in hand with Servlet 2.5. A proper Servlet 2.5 declared web.xml starts as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app 
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
    version="2.5">

    <!-- Config here. -->

</web-app>

If you're using an older versioned servletcontainer which you can really not upgrade to at least a Servlet 2.5 compatible one, then you need to let us know first which one it is so that we can if possibly post more suited answers/workarounds.