this is most likely a rant on jsp and servlets (cringe), judging by the time period, struts was probably used in combination with these technologies which had to run on some overly expensive app server or tomcat, and needed to include the j2ee sdk (java 2 enterprise edition for all you youngins) even if you're just using servlets, j2ee and ejbs were a whole other ball of mess.

i can relate, writing apps in rails, django, etc is much better than what was available back in the day (8 years ago!) for java side, spring was just starting to emerge around that time if not later which gives you a pretty comparable experience to rails.