Question

why is this working?

    <td><c:forEach items="${profileForm.cityOptions}" var="city">
                ....Some Code
    </c:forEach></td>

and in my profielForm been i only have a getCityOptions() method nothing of cityOptions .
its working but i need some explanation.

Answer 1

That’s the principle of the EL. It looks for Java bean properties. A bean property is some information available by a public getter, obeying the JavaBeans conventions. It can also be set using a JavaBean setter, obeying the JavaBeans conventions:

public Foo getFoo();
public void setFoo(Foo foo);
public boolean isCool();
public void setCool(boolean cool);

The EL doesn’t care about the fields of your objects. This is private, encapsulated stuff. So getFoo() could trigger a complex computation returning a Foo instance, or simply return a field named foo, bar or anything else. The EL doesn’t care.