Hi Brian ,
You are confusing Bean Law and JSP Law
By bean law it is required for the bean to have getter and setter methods
And JSP law advocates that beans strictly follow this rule
so that we dont get an error when we do setProperty for eg
But there is no check in JSP itself to actually validate that the
bean being displayed follows the rules .You will get the error at run time
Hence in this case it has getter methods and we are accessing only the
getter methods when we do something like
beanname.property which will internally call
beanname 's getProperty method
In fact you can try this on any variable (even if it is not a
java bean )but if it doesnt have the
getter method then nothing will be displayed
There is no check in JSP specs itself to ensure at complie time that
name on the left is a bean or map
Hope you get it
Thanks
Shiva