Thought everyone concerned would be interested to know that Weblogic 6.1 SP5 (SP4 was working fine) has a problem compiling JSP pages when <bean:define> is used to expose a scripting variable. Example: <bean:define id="myObject" name="theObject" scope="session" type="whatever"/> <% myObject.myMethod(); %> This produces a compilation problem by weblogic. Apparently in the SP5, it evaluates the scriptlets first before the custom tags, hence, "Cannot resolve symbol 'myObject' " is produced. The code was working fine until we upgraded to SP 5 which produced the errors.