Java Quirks: When a Collection is a String (using JSP Tags)

My code was as follows:

The jsp:

<mdisplay:table collection="${requestScope.mycollection}">
   <mdisplay:column property="id">
   </mdisplay:column>
</mdisplay:table>

The table.tag file:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@ attribute name="collection" required="true" rtexprvalue="true"%>
<%@ variable name-given="item" scope="NESTED" declare="true" %>

<c:foreach items="${collection}" var="item">
    <jsp:dobody>
</jsp:dobody>

</c:foreach>

The column.tag file:

<%@ attribute name="property" required="true" %>
${item[property]} 

Result: didn't work.

 I thought that it was just that I didn't understand the whole "variable" thing in tag files (which was likely), so I change my code the following way:

The table.tag file:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@ attribute name="collection" required="true" rtexprvalue="true"%>
<%@ variable name-given="item" scope="NESTED" declare="true" %>

<c:foreach items="${collection}" var="item">
    <c:set var="item" value="${a}" scope="request">
        <jsp:dobody>
        </jsp:dobody>
    </c:set>
</c:foreach>

The column.tag file:

<%@ attribute name="property" required="true" %>
${requestScope.item[property]} 

It didn't work either, throwing an exception stating " cannot find property id in class String"... WTH? It ends up that if you don't specify the type of a tag attribute, it is assumed to be "String". By stating that "collection" is in fact a java.util.Collection, everything worked fine: The table.tag file:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@ attribute name="collection" required="true" rtexprvalue="true" type="java.util.Collection"%>
<%@ variable name-given="item" scope="NESTED" declare="true" %>

<c:foreach items="${collection}" var="item">
    <c:set var="item" value="${a}" scope="request">
        <jsp:dobody>
        </jsp:dobody>
    </c:set>
</c:foreach>

It would have been nice that the JSP processor had the capability to infer the type of the parameter, but things are the way they are. Happy Coding!