Hey guys, I figured it out. Although it doesn't make total sense to me right now since it doesn't exactly line up with the EL Specification. But here is what I started with...
As you will notice in the part this.style.color='${status.index % 2 == 0 ? 'white' : '#EEE' }'; that I have single quotes around my EL. My thinking was that the single quote would be put into the html and the value from the EL would plop in between them, since the value needs to be in a single quote.
What was happening is that the single quote was acting as an escape character for the EL and so instead of getting 'white' or '#EEE' in my code I was getting my EL as a literal. I tried all kinds of stuff. I tried double quotes and combinations of double quotes with single quotes and single quoting the single quotes and on and on. Then it hit me. And here is my solution. Make the quotes part of my returned value. So now I have this coded...
This worked like a charm and I've got no problems now.
Like I said, the EL Specification doesn't totally jive here.
You want to look at page 19 of the PDF in this link...
https://jsp.dev.java.net/spec/jsp-2_1-fr-spec-el.pdf Thanks for all of your help guys, this is just one exception case I think in the Websphere container.