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Answer : You need to realize that Java/JSP is merely a HTML/CSS/JS code producer. So all you need to do is to just let JSP print the Java variable as if it is a JavaScript variable and that the generated HTML/JS code output is syntactically valid. Provided that the Java variable is available in the EL scope by ${foo} , here are several examples how to print it: <script>var foo = '${foo}';</script> <script>someFunction('${foo}');</script> <div onclick="someFunction('${foo}')">...</div> Imagine that the Java variable has the value "bar" , then JSP will ultimately generate this HTML which you can verify by rightclick, View Source in the webbrowser: <script>var foo = 'bar';</script> <script>someFunction('bar');</script> <div onclick="someFunction('bar')">...</div> Do note that those singlequotes are thus mandatory in ord...

Answer : I recently discovered Thymeleaf. It looks to be a complete replacement for JSPs and has integration with Spring MVC. The template approach looks more like HTML and may be more palatable to your UI designers. They have a small write-up that compares the two solutions side-by-side. In the standard Java EE API, the only alternative to JSP is Facelets. As far now (2010) JSF is the only MVC framework which natively supports Facelets. Spring MVC supports out of the box only JSP, but it has a configurable view resolver which allows you to use Facelets anyway. Other candiates are 3rd party templating frameworks such as Velocity, Freemarker, and Thymeleaf which can be configured as a view technology for Spring MVC. Spring documentation has integration examples with Velocity and Freemarker. I recently started going with plain HTML and jQuery for presentation with Spring MVC only creating a JSON view. So far it's going quite well and even though I have to do the javascri...