It works for me on
Tomcat 7, both with runtime scriptlet expressions and EL expressions.
The only time I see a null pointer exception is when the variable "includePage" is null.
Are you sure that value is being set correctly?
Under the hood, the tag is obtaining a request dispatcher and calling forward on it so
the (almost) equivalent scriptlet code would be
The request dispatcher will return null if the requested resource does not exist under your JSP container.
So if your static html pages are being served by a web server (eg Apache + Tomcat combination) then <jsp:include> won't work, as it purely looks under Tomcat.