Always try to minimize the amount of example code you post. One of the downsides of getting free help is that when you post something that overflows the screen, it's a lot harder for us to get motivated to wade through it.
I think your problem is here:
EL is not intended as a programming language. Programming should be done on the Model, not on the View. In particular, read/write property references, such as those made by "value=" are unsuited for programmatic access, since
Java doesn't return references to objects, it returns objects, and a method call is effectively only going to read and not write.
So try this instead:
>