Maybe ... but I was using Zope and Plone in the late '90s, so there were definitely higher-level tools for web development then. We were also writing Java servlets in '98 or '99 and when I switched companies in '01, we were already using JSPs.
It is not something the author should care about, because it's very new with uncertain future. Most likely he will find a job on some typical Java codebase(standard approach to concurrency problems).