Also, I'd like to point out it isn't an either/or decision with OGNL and
JSP EL. For example, the Struts 2 tags don't allow JSP EL within their attributes, for security reasons, so you are only allowed to use OGNL expressions there. As Chad pointed out, OGNL is very powerful, but unfortunately, at least in my opinion, JSP EL is the opposite - not powerful enough. One of the features under discussion in the Struts dev list is how to resolve this by perhaps extending the JSP EL, then using it over OGNL, but again, that is only in the very early discussion phase and may or may not ever happen.