Object Properties Using Value Expressions in JSTL

I found out something cool about JSTL’s expression language today that I didn’t expect at all – like a real scripting language, EL allows one to access an object’s fields not only like object.fieldname (which wouldn’t be changeable at runtime) but also as object[“fieldname”] and by extension with any string variable as an argument. Wow! I don’t remember seeing any examples of this in the wild – somehow i stumbled upon it in the bowels of a unified expression language tutorial.

This came in handy DRYing out some JSP code today that differed only in the fields accessed on the same kind of objects – I thought immediately, if only I had a scripting language this could all go away! Then I thought about the long and winding road one might take to do that in java, involving reflection and/or long if/else blocks. I was pleasantly surprised to find out JSTL can do that. Phew.
Here’s a poor example:

What you’d have to do w/o this capability

${object.dog}
${object.cat}

and with

<c :set var="fieldName" value="dog" />
${object[fieldName]}

i told you it was a bad example.