You're not following the Javabean coding conventions (which is necessary for use with EL).
If you have a property named "thing", the setter should be spelled "setThing" and the getter should be spelled "getThing". Notice the capital "T".
When you use the EL expression ${modelBean.thing}, the
JSP engine is going to add the "get" and capitalize the first letter, turning it into "getThing". Since
Java is case sensitive, a method named getthing would not match.