With EL, is it possible to do field access on beans rather than getters/setters?

Question

EDIT

Take this answer with a grain of salt. Much has changed since I asked this question years ago. I recommend now using Lombok instead of my EL solution. Leaving the original question for historical reasons.

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I'm serious tired of getters/setters clogging my code, when I don't need to control access to the internal state of an object. The only real reason I have to still generate getters/setters is because EL works by locating methods, not fields: ${myBean.fieldName}. where fieldName refers to the method getFieldName(). Would it be possible to extend an EL Resolver to just return the public field value unless a getter was found?

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Update based on answer of Steve Atkinson: I hope this helps someone else. Notice how I explicitly check that I only use this elresolver on Form or Lead objects, which are my domain objects.

public class PublicFieldSupportingELResolver extends ELResolver {
    @Override
    public Class<?> getCommonPropertyType(ELContext context, Object base) {
        if (base instanceof Form || base instanceof Lead) {
            try {
                context.setPropertyResolved(true);
                return base.getClass();
            } catch (Exception e) {
                context.setPropertyResolved(false);
                return null;
            }
        } else {
            context.setPropertyResolved(false);
            return null;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public Iterator<FeatureDescriptor> getFeatureDescriptors(ELContext context, Object base) {
        return null;
    }

    @Override
    public Class<?> getType(ELContext context, Object base, Object property) {
        if (base instanceof Form || base instanceof Lead) {
            try {
                Field field = base.getClass().getField((String) property);
                context.setPropertyResolved(true);
                return field.getType();
            } catch (Exception e) {
                context.setPropertyResolved(false);
                return null;
            }
        } else {
            context.setPropertyResolved(false);
            return null;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public Object getValue(ELContext context, Object base, Object property) {
        if (base instanceof Form || base instanceof Lead) {
            try {
                Field field = base.getClass().getField((String) property);
                Object value = field.get(base);
                context.setPropertyResolved(true);
                return value;
            } catch (Exception e) {
                context.setPropertyResolved(false);
                return null;
            }
        } else {
            context.setPropertyResolved(false);
            return null;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public boolean isReadOnly(ELContext context, Object base, Object property) {
        if (base instanceof Form || base instanceof Lead) {
            try {
                base.getClass().getField((String) property);
                context.setPropertyResolved(true);
                return true;
            } catch (Exception e) {
                context.setPropertyResolved(false);
                return false;
            }
        } else {
            context.setPropertyResolved(false);
            return false;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void setValue(ELContext context, Object base, Object property, Object value) {
        if (base instanceof Form || base instanceof Lead) {
            try {
                Field field = base.getClass().getField((String) property);
                field.set(base, value);
                context.setPropertyResolved(true);
            } catch (Exception e) {
                context.setPropertyResolved(false);
            }
        } else {
            context.setPropertyResolved(false);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

You can use @Getter/@Setter annotations from Project Lombok if you don't want to write/generate getter and setter method(s) on your Java Bean.