I'm porting a JSP-based application over to tomcat and I have noticed that 
when you use the JSP expression tag (i.e. <%= ... %>) and the object 
included in the expression evaluates to null, the tag returns "null". This 
is what I expect from Java however the JSP compiler we are coming from 
includes a helper utility to take null object references and convert them 
to an empty string automatically.  I believe the spec. doesn't mandate 
this behavior but I was wondering if it's possible to get this behavior in 
tomcat (or jasper).  Basically, when Object myObject = null, <%= myObject 
%> evaluates to "" in our existing appserver but it evaluates to "null" in 
tomcat.  In order to port our application, we will need to go through all 
of our JSPs (no small task) and do the null to "" conversion ourselves. 
Can anyone suggest a work around?  This seems like it would be a fairly 
common problem.  Thanks.

Kirk Everett

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