This is a Tomcat-specific issue with the Apache JSTL implementation. If you don't use a 2.4 web.xml, the EL expressions don't get evaluated in the JSP.

www.corejsf.com is a good place.

I don't want to discourage you, but JSF is a hard technology to master if you're writing big applications (although the basics of it aren't too bad to learn).
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When you reference ${nickname} from JSTL, what the JSP is doing is looking in either the request object for a nickname attribute or the session object [i.e., request.getAttribute("nickname")]. So if...