Take a closer look at the article title. It says "Create JSF-
like components". Not quite the same thing as creating JSF components!
My Mantra for the Month here on the JSF forum is "Don't Put Logic in the View". A JSF page is primarily about presentation of logical structure, so it works best in cases where the actual data and display control is done behind the scenes (in the backing bean). It's not that you can't embed straight HTML,
JSP tags or JSTL in a JSF page, but you usually shouldn't and
you should never be surprised when it doesn't co-operate. There's a completely different display paradigm in operation when you use JSF.
It's perfectly OK to mix JSF and non-JSF on a website (including both straight JSP and
Struts). However, life will be more pleasant if you don't try and mix JSF and non-JSF strategies on the same page.
Don't avoid dataTables just because you don't want "tables". A dataTable is simply an abstract row-by-row view of a multi-row model built on the JSF data model class. How it actually comes out on the display end is a product of what type of renderer is in use and in the case of HTML rendering, the styles you apply to its display components.
Having preached my little sermon, however, it appears you're expecting to use the EL to do compound object references to a servlet and that would probably actually require mucking around in the beanUtils, which is more work than I'd want to put into it. It's easier and simpler to use a backing bean.