Hey PJ, I like your posts because you have the historical background on a lot of this stuff that industry has mostly forgotten.
But... Since you mentioned it, I actually have read J2EE and WebObjects documentation. And I conclude that WebObjects was shit. It drew the 'Web MVC' line at the completely wrong place. Nobody ever cared about about DOEs or whatever, they just wanted a database driver. You look at this huge pile of industry crap and its no wonder why Rails was successful.
If you know J2EE 1.0 and read the WebObjects for Java documentation, there will be very similar examples.