At 11:23 AM -0500 6/10/05, Michael Rasmussen wrote:

There's more than a hint; I've been using JEXL extensively with chain in my day job, and have made suggestions to the list before that it could be useful. However, I am sensitive to the general sense that dependencies should be added lightly.

Specifically, situations where you use the actual Chain context itself as the Expression evaluation context (or at least its basis) make a lot of cool things possible.

I'm about to leave for vacation for a week, but I think this is a good general idea and would only want to see if other people have strong feelings about the dependencies or the packaging. (One suggestion was that chain could have a secondary distribution artifact, something like ant-optional. Obviously that solves the dependency question neatly, but it adds considerable management overhead, and I simply haven't had time lately to set things up that way.)

Anyway, if it comes down to using an expression library, I'd argue for JEXL over commons-el because JEXL supports method invocation, which is incredibly handy.

Joe