Oh yes, servlets were such a breath of fresh air. However that was more of an afterthought- I remember that when it came out I initially bought into the write-

Oh yes, servlets were such a breath of fresh air. However that was more of an afterthought- I remember that when it came out I initially bought into the write-once-run-anywhere hype and the idea that Java was for writing applets. The UIs were too clunky (AWT) or foreign (Swing, the second attempt) and the Java SDKs buggy so in the end HTML just improved faster and took over the presentation layer together with Futuresplash (later renamed to Flash).