Looks like you have been bitten by this change in EL 3.0
The default coercion for nulls to non-primitive types (except String) returns nulls. For instance, a null coerced to Boolean now returns a null, while a null coerced to boolean returns false.
Try setting the system property org.apache.el.parser.COERCE_TO_ZERO
to true
to force the EL 2.2 and earlier behaviour.