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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."
It took them long enough to decide to finally release a final version! :-P
I'm not complaining. It's great that they did - now finally all those IDE vendors are going to put real struts 1.1 support in their software. It's a very good step politically and for the general acceptation of Struts by corporations and such.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
... After a whole 3 seconds of research... Struts homepage
"Welcome to Struts! The goal of this project is to provide an open source framework for building web applications."
You can find many links related to Struts on Ted Husted's page, because he's the lead developer for Struts and the author of the O'Reilly thereon.
In the opinion of some of the smarter Java developers, Struts is no longer the best of the WADF's in the Java world. Some of them seem to prefer WebWork, which is now part of OpenSymphony. Debate over Struts is raging.
Check out an attempted improvement to Struts.
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
In addition to Webwork, Maverick and Tapestry are often brought up as alternatives to Struts. Roughly, Maverick seems to be more flexible and to be especially well suited to xslt. Tapestry does what Struts does and a whole lot more; it provides a component-based framework similar to Webobjects. All of these frameworks are similar in that they try to implement MVC (Model-View-Controller) and to separate of html from code. They also all require some time to learn and understand which is why it's hard to come up with an answer as to which is best: few people have the time to look at all of them and make a considered judgement. But using any of them is much better than using nothing.
Struts is a web application development framework (WADF), of which there are many.
While factually correct, "many" might be an understatement. It seems everyone and their uncle/brother/dog/etc. are inventing WADFs, which get haphazardly adopted by organizations throughout the world leaving web developers feeling their resume is somehow inadeqate.
Some of them seem to prefer WebWork, which is now part of OpenSymphony. Debate over Struts is raging.
This is what is so frustrating, where the turn-over in fashionable WADFs is rampant. I would cringe upon hearing "Struts is so, like, 2001." That was only two years ago! Ugh.
Rather than adopting a "framework" that is almost certain to fall short in its capacity, why don't web developers adopt something even better: objective simplicity. Frameworks can be a constant battling ground for new employees and old employees alike, when learning and re-learning the framework becomes burdensome. Isn't good software architecture supposed to make things intuitive, even to the average software developer?
I believe the multitude of frameworks are the product of severe NIH syndrome, rather than genuine well-intentioned common sense.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Wish I had points with which to mod you up.
However, I do have a couple of minor observations. 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). There are always tradeoffs to be made.
And, it could be argued that a profusion of WADF's is a good thing in that it puts a wide variety of ideas out there, which should (in theory) yield a higher chance of something good showing up.
Yours are still valid concerns though.
Read my keyboard review.
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