[p8]

Nobody cares about performance if you build a business application with a couple of users, a common use-case in 2005. The reason a lot of Java people jumped on the Rails bandwagon, was that an application that would take a month to build in Java with Spring/Hibernate, would take a day in Rails. See also: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/

[pjmlp]

Some Java people did, there is a reason why Ruby is hardly used outside Rails, while Java rules most of the backend workloads, a mobile OS, and plenty of embedded workloads.

[p8]

There's also a reason Kotlin has become the language of choice for the Android development industry, Scala became a thing, and ThoughtWorks recommended against using JavaServerFaces.

[pjmlp]

Because Android team had some Kotlin shills that pushed for it with management blessing, and they are in bed with JetBrains for the Android IDE, that is why, and even them had to accept updating Java support, otherwise Android/Kotlin would lose the ecosystem of Java written libraries, hence Java 11 LTS last year, and Java 17 LTS this year going, back to Android 12 with APEX archives.

Scala became a thing indeed, where it is now besides Spark?

ThoughWorks is a consultancy that recomends whatever brings new projects.

[p8]

So where are the Shopify's of that era build on Struts and JSF?

[pjmlp]

Amazon.

[p8]

Amazon was founded in 1994, that's not the same era.

Ruby didn't even exist back then and was released a year later. Rails was released in 2004. Shopify was founded in in 2006, 12 years after Amazon.