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Struts 1.1 Released
Evil Grinn writes "The long-awaited release of Struts 1.1 has finally happened. See the release notes for all of the changes since the last Release Candidate and also since Struts 1.0.2. Many new features are available in a stable production release for the first time today. Congratulations to the entire Struts team."
Oh, but you're talking about setup wizards, right? Yeah, JBuilder 8 only supports Struts 1.0, and JBuilder 9 only supports Struts 1.1 beta release. Even then, the wizards don't get you very far. Other than allowing newbees to learn the ropes, I don't see the use in setup wizards, but that's just me.
On the other hand, when using NetBeans code synchronization, it's very helpful. It looks for methods that should be overridden, and overrides them with one dialog box, then you just write implementation, which is kick-ass. Not exactly the same thing as supporting Struts directly, but helpful none the less.
It'd be nice if there was a Netbeans module that would read the struts-config.xml and present it in a form, like the TLD module.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Objective simplicity is a laudable goal, but it conflicts with the goals of flexibility, performance, and ability to meet the requirements of the subject matter (if the subject matter is complex).
With regard to performance and flexibility, simplicity can be good, given that, sometimes, simplicity is actually more difficult to attain initially than ad-hoc complexity, which the popular frameworks tend to encourage (i.e., simplicity often requires some thought and modesty, but the fruit of that effort is forever delicious).
For example, in the long-run, it is easier to maintain a hierarchy of HTML/XHTML and CGI pages or a multi-tier JavaScript/XML/JSP/Servlet/Struts/EJB/etc/etc application? In practice, honestly, which is more likely to perform well, work predictably across browsers, and withstand the tests of time? Which method can be picked up easily by new hires or relearned quickly enough to make incremental changes month-to-month practical?
For very complex content, warranting permanent staff, it seems plausible (not speaking from experience) that DocBook could make for a very good base format, and the maturing XML tools, like XSLT, could provide a fairly direct and simple means of generating web pages as needed. Hourly Perl scripts could even keep static content up-to-date without adding much complexity and removing much of the need for real-time dynamic content. Something like DocBook also means for approximately one amount of effort, a multitude of outputs are possible (HTML and PostScript, for example). While this method might not be totally practical today, due to the immaturity of XML, it does seem promising.
Either way, it seems that simple tools can be used to make a solid website, where a one-page chart is sufficient for a person to really understand how things fit together.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
IDE support is not just setup wizards - it would include things like compile time validation (e.g. 'Error in adduser.jsp: Action mapping "/addUser" does not exist' and the like)
It would also include good support for refactoring - have you ever tried to rename a function in one of your Struts applications? You need to rename jsp filenames, Action mappings, ActionForms, class files, packages...it's a bloody nightmare having to restart the server and test everything just to find what you've forgotten to change!
While I'm not sure about other IDE's, Websphere Studio Application Developer 5 has some initial Struts support (1.1 beta 2 I think), but it has a long way to go to providing the full set of features a Struts developer would like to see. It does do the GUI presentation of struts-config.xml files you'd like to see though.