Whenever using struts html:text tags, be careful with the 'disabled' flag. It may appear that it just disables the field for input, and indeed it shows the value in the form in the grayed-out field. In reality though, it is going to send a null value when you submit the form regardless of what seems to be the case.
Use the 'readonly' flag instead if you want a non-null value to be submitted.
In the course of working on more J2EE web applications, I am starting to run into things that annoy me about Java. One of the biggest annoyances I run into when developing web applications in Java is the lack of support for String in case constructs. Apparently I am not alone.