No, I never use scriplets. And you cannot use scriplets in some places (within the body of custom actions implementing SimpleTag, tag files, etc). But you can't reference statics directly. You must create an EL-friendly means of access.
For example, let's say there are a number of constants that you want to reference all over the web app. In a context listener you could load up a Map in application context (say, named "Constants") and load the map with entries whose key represents the contant name and whose value represents the contant value.
For example:
henceforth referenced via EL as:
You could even nest Maps within Maps to create a hiearchical constant tree if you wish. [ May 27, 2005: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]