Currenty I have a web project with JSF 1.2 and Facelets running in tomcat 6.0.18.0. I decided to upgrade the servlet container, thus i deployed in tomcat 7 and all seemed ok
You can also try changing the syntax. I had the same exact problem with code that I was maintaining when we were moving from Tomcat 6 to 7. I had to change myobject.class.name to myobject['class'].name. After I made this change my code worked perfectly again.