How can I make the ${foo} syntax work?

Question

Hello,
I have a jsp page and I am using Webwork with the action class exposing beans to the ognl value stack.
Should I be able to write ${foo} with JSTL? I get the expected value if I write <c:out value="${foo}"/> I do get the expected value.
The real reason I am asking is because I am trying to use a custom taglib and the parameters are not being evaluated. For example, ${accounts} should represent a collection and when I use <input:selectBox options="${accounts}"/> - the actual string "${accounts}" is passed to the tag. I would really appreciate some help. Thank you very much.
I am using apache-tomcat 4.1.39 with jakarta-taglibs-standard-1.0.6 for the JSTL implementation. Thank you very much for any help you might be able to offer.
Regards,
Joe

Answer 1

Thank you very much for the response... that makes a lot of sense. I still have 1 question though... this is the strange part;
The standard JSTL taglibs seem to be able to handle the ${} syntax yet I am also working with a custom taglib that does not seem to have the tags parsed. If you can help me fix this, I would be extremely grateful...
This works fine:
<c:forEach items="${accounts}" var="account">
     <c:out value="${account.accountNumber}"/>
</c:forEach>
But, when using the custom taglib:
<input:selectBox options="${accounts}"/>
the options value in the tag class is actually "${accounts}" and no the list which ${accounts} represents. Do you have any idea as to why this would occur? Here is the tld (snipped to show the parts I am referring to)
     <tag>
          <name>selectBox</name>
          <tag-class>example.SelectBoxTag</tag-class>
          <body-content>JSP</body-content>
          <display-name>selectBox</display-name>
          <attribute>
               <name>options</name>
               <required>false</required>
               <rtexprvalue>true</rtexprvalue>
               <type>java.lang.Object</type>
               <description>Any collection of elements to be added to select list</description>
          </attribute>
     </tag>
thank you very much.
Joe