Seeking understanding for why beans in EL must be parameterless

[testing123]

So I have had a few questions for a while now and have never fully understood the reasons some things work the way they do. Because I respect the opinions of many this forum I thought I would get some of your thoughts on the best way of handling certain situations.

1. Why can you not have parameters method calls in beans in EL? I have read a lot about this and it seems this was enforced because of some higher general priniciple that I do not understand. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

2. If indeed, parameters should not be used how am I supposed stuff like the following:

2a. Let's say I was setting up a website where I wanted to translate some text on a page. This page is dynamically created and in order to get back the correct translation I need to use 3 pieces of information: the locale, the id, and the default text (if no translation is found). Because I could have multiple locales on the same page I can't just put the locale in the parameters.

Answer: I could have a static method declared in a tld and then call that like ${myfn:translate(myLocale, messageId, "default text")} (Aren't static methods as a general rule bad?) Thoughts?

Answer: I could set up some nested maps like translatorMap[myLocale][messageId]['default text'] but that too seems like a poor way of handling it.

Answer: I wish I could just put my bean in the application context and call ${translator.translate(myLocale, messageId, "defaultText")} but you can't have parameters in EL. Why?

2b. What if I am creating some text in a jsp page based on id. I want to use that id to check an see if I have more information available from the database, if it is there then make the text a link if not then don't make it a link.

Answer: Do all the checking before hand. That seems like a simple answer but this logic needs to happen on a lot of the pages on our website and each of these pages change a lot and it seems like it would be a maintenance nightmare.

Answer: Again I could use static methods or maps.

Answer: I wish I coul just do something like this textBean.displayText(textId) and then my logic could happen in there.

Final thoughts:translator and textBean are singleton bean in my application context. I initialize them when the server starts up. Perhaps I am missing something obvious on a normal clean way of doing things as mentioned above. I have already got both examples working using the static methods and maps so its not an issue of figuring out where a bug is. I just want to get some of your thoughts on what the best ways are to handle situations like this.

[testing123]

Shameless self bump...