Struts Kick Start

Simon P. Chappell writes "I started learning how to use the Struts framework in late in 2001, after I became fed-up with hacking web applications together with the digital equivalent of "Duct-tape Engineering". At that time there were no books available for the budding Struts developer, "Read The Fine Manual" was not an option ... you read the website, you read the code or you asked questions on the mailing list. This situation finally changed this fall with the release of a flurry of titles dedicated to Struts. I present here my thoughts on one of the latest: "Struts Kick Start". The rest of Simon's review follows. Struts Kick Start author James Turner and Kevin Bedell pages 481 (29 page index) publisher Sams rating 9 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 0672324725 summary You need this book

What is Struts?

Struts is a framework for developing web applications. It is a distilation of the current set of known best practices into a working code set that can be extended to meet almost any web application requirements. It part of the Jakarta Project at the Apache Software Foundation.

What do I know about Struts? I have been developing web applications, using Java, for four years and using struts for over a year, and am a regular participant on the Struts mailing list. I was also a technical reviewer for one of the other Struts Books released this fall and was recently invited to speak at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire on the use of Struts.

What's good about this book? There are many excellent things that I could point to. I particularly like the obvious depth of research that accompanies this book. There is a very interesting history of the development of the MVC design pattern and they even name the inventor. Do you know who invented MVC? If you want to know, buy the book! The chapters cover everything that you will need to know, in the order you are most likely to need to know it. There's even a chapter explaining the "struts-config.xml" file's DTD! (You may want to skip that on the first few readings :-)

There is good coverage of the Struts taglibs. I see a lot of questions about these on the mailing lists, so this information is very timely and it looks very well explained.

I like the coverage of other open source tools that work well with Struts. This is an important point because Struts does not do everything for you (by design), so there will be areas that will benefit from other tools. I'm looking forward to trying out some of their recommendations and easing my own Struts development lifecycles.

What's not so good? Just one niggle, and it's more of a programming style issue, but in their example code they have references to their business objects. They explain that it is important to separate out business logic from action logic, which it is, but then proceed to use their business object within the action.

Now, I realise that example code is not the same thing as robust, production-ready code, but when people are first learning a language or framework, they tend to copy exactly what they see in the book they are learning from. Even though example code should be light on error checking, it should be heavy on correctness and good style.

Should you rush out and buy it? If you are about to use Struts on a project, are new to Struts and need dead tree documentation for those RTFM moments or are evaluating Struts for future projects, then you absolutely need this book.

If you are an intermediate Struts user, then this book would still be very useful to you and I can certainly recommend it.

If you are an experienced Struts user, then you've almost certainly exchanged emails with James or Kevin, on the Struts mailing list, so you can make your own mind up!

Table of Contents

1. Struts in Context
2. The Model-View-Controller Design Pattern
3. Hello World!
4. HTTP Protocol
5. JSP, Taglibs and JSTL
6. The Sample Application
7. View Components
8. The Controller
9. Model Components
10. The struts-config.xml File
11. How the Struts Tag Libraries Work
12. Struts HTML Tags
13. Struts Bean Tags
14. Struts Logic Tags
15. The Nested and Template Struts Tag Libraries
16. The Struts Tiles Tag Library
17. DynaForms and the Validator
18. Using Struts with Enterprise Java Beans
19. Using Struts with Web Services
20. Building, Deploying and Testing Struts Applications

You can purchase Struts Kick Start from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

No idea what it does

[dnoyeb]

I still have NO IDEA what struts does. the struts website is not helpful in a brief overview. Saying it helps develop web applications is a joke. What does it replace because I can develop web apps without struts.

Should I be using it? Im too unknowledgeable to even know what question to ask. I use EJB, and I have a webapp. I'm just baffled.

Is it just me...?

[Malic]

...or is it that Struts, JavaServer Faces and MVC methodologies merely enforce good coding techniques/styles that one should be using anyway? Regardless of if you are using PHP, Perl, etc.

Or is there something more here?

Sometimes I think Java, OO and other development technologies are like grammer school teachers hovering over our heads saying, "Now, we *know* you are going to be sloppy if left on your own, so are going box you in so that you CAN'T do those sloppy things."

Except that you still can. VERY easy to understand and maintain applications can be coding procedual languages. VERY difficult to understand and maintain applications can be written in OO languages.

But I digress... by nature.

Re:Show the full respect of Struts...

[rutledjw]

No, no, no. As you get going in Java you'll be the logic in it. As a novice programmer, it SHOULD take you a lot longer to use a tool like struts than use (whatever). You're still getting used to the syntax, flow and appropriate use of Java.

As you get going, there becomes a more elegant technique to using teh language. Tools like struts fill the need.

Learn what you can now and don't worry about it, the usefullness of struts will become evident as you progress.

Re:Show the full respect of Struts...

[CorwinOfAmber]

I haven't gotten into it a lot, but it seems to take me a whole lot longer to get a project done with struts than if I just used scriplet code.

Well of course it's going to be faster and easier (for you) to just put all of the code in scriptlets. But I sure wouldn't want to have to maintain your code. You don't separate your business logic from your display code because it's faster to develop it; you separate your code to make it easier to maintain, and more robust. Writing maintainable code is always going to be a bit more work in the short term, but it pays off over the long term.