I've written a proposal for adding a pluggable type conversions in EL
3.0 in the wiki
http://java.net/projects/el-spec/pages/TypeConverter
ELContext now contains an instance of TypeConverter, which is consulted
for all coercions in expression evaluations. I've also add a
setTypeConverter method in ELManager to allow pluggin in a
TypeConverter. The wiki has an example for this.
It is not clear yet if this can be used for handling null pointers.
Looks like it may, but I'll need to look into it more.
Please let me know if you see any problems with this. Thanks.
Kin-man