EL 3.0 specification says in 1.22.2 "Imports of Packages, Classes, and Static Fields" that "Importing a package imports all the classes in the package."

I think that that is wrong and it shall actually say that it imports all *public* classes in the package.

It may result in spirituous conflicts during resolveClass() -- see the example below.

Consider the following example:
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Mr.Cameron has class com.cameron.Terminator and uses package import to make it accessible.

ImportHandler handler = new ImportHandler();
handler.importPackage("com.cameron");
handler.resolveClass("Terminator");

If it really were importing all classes from a package, the above code will run successfully on some JRE, but will fail on Oracle Java 7 JRE that has "java.lang.Terminator" class, due to ambiguity between the two classes.

The "java.lang.Terminator" class is not part of public API of a JRE. A JRE vendor is free to add such classes. It should not cause such spiritual failures.


Javadoc for javax.el.ImportHandler in JavaEE 7 [1] says that resolveClass(String) throws ELException - if the class is <...> not public.

If resolveClass(String) method were changed to return 'null' for non-public classes instead of throwing an ELException, it would be a bit easier to implement.

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/7/api/javax/el/ImportHandler.html