new Glassfish/Javamail session and Struts/Struts Action seem to work fine..

there seems to be this code snippet scattered around the codebase (grep for "NewFileWizard_Title") :

        // XXX hack, TemplateWizard in final setTemplateImpl() forces new wizard's title
        // this name is used in NewFileWizard to modify the title
        Object substitute = gui.getClientProperty ("NewFileWizard_Title"); // NOI18N
        if (substitute != null) {
            wizard.putProperty ("NewFileWizard_Title", substitute); // NOI18N
        }

That's why it somewhere works and not in the servlet wizard..
reassigning to openide

It needs to be fixed in Servlet wizard panel "Configure Servlet Deployment".

I don't think I understand why each template iterator needs to copy-paste some boiler-plate code annotated by a "XXX
hack" comment. It seems the New File wizard needs fixing, not the iterators.

Well, you don't need to copy any "XXX hack", just add following line to the panel code:

putClientProperty("NewFileWizard_Title", "My title");

To fix this correctly would require rewrite of project new file wizards and that will not probably happen in near future.
Also I think that according to bug priority guidelines (http://qa.netbeans.org/bugzilla/bug_priority_guidelines.html)
it's P4/P5.

I won't argue about the priority, but I would argue about the putClientProperty() call. The template author has already
set the name of the template, there is no reason to expect him to do it again in all (or all but the first) panels.

Setting priority according to bug priority guidelines.

Change of default owner.

This old bug may not be relevant anymore. If you can still reproduce it in 8.2 development builds please reopen this issue.

Thanks for your cooperation,
NetBeans IDE 8.2 Release Boss