[mhw]

Oh, yeah - absolutely. The servlet API was very much of its time, and for several years it seemed to be a good solution. I think it's only in retrospect that it became more clear that there were key challenges that everyone faced in building a web application that the servlet API, and J2EE more broadly, didn't solve. For me that was the thing Rails demonstrated: a full stack solution for building web applications that actually tackled the real problems (like routing requests from URLs to controller methods). And I think the major changes to J2EE since have been in large part a reaction to Rails showing what problems a web framework should actually try to solve.