Sorry. I misread. Again.
If your EL is being displayed instead of compiled, one of 2 things is probably to blame.
1. You're referencing the page via its resource path (.jsp) instead of its URL (.jsf). If you don't use the .jsf extension, then the request won't be processed by the FacesServlet and none of the
JSF functions will work right.
2. You're missing TLD info that defines the "h" (and maybe "f") tag namespaces. I normally use xhtml (Facelets) with xml fomat, so I have supply the namespace info as part of my XML. If you're using
JSP resources, check the book. There should be some additional text that goes above what you've shown, although for brevity's sake, they may omit it in the examples after the first 1 or 2.