This article shows you how to develop a Struts application in the Eclipse IDE, with the help of the Easy Struts plug-in. You’ll get an introduction to Easy Struts, installation and configuration steps, and instructions on building a basic Struts application through a progressive example. Different ways of enhancing the Struts application — such as connecting to a database, modularizing the application, internationalizing and localizing content, handling exceptions, and creating custom plug-ins — are also covered. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your Struts application on the Tomcat Web server.
Developing Struts with Easy Struts for Eclipse
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Struts is showing its age. There are a few frameworks out there are require much less boiler plate code and are more productive.
I have posted a small struts vs webwork2 comparison here –>
http://sutternow.com/index.do?caldate=2004-04-20
I’ve used Easy Struts, but stopped about a year ago, after frustration with its occasional mutilation of the struts-config.xml file. Seeing this article, I checked out the easy struts homepage, and see that they haven’t released a new version since I stopped using it.
I use struts itself, and enjoy it. Easy Struts, though a good idea and initially a good effort, hasn’t moved much in the last year from what I can tell.
Matt – I’m reading your comparison right now, thanks for posting. I like to keep one eye open for additional/different tools.
The only thing I like about Struts is that it’s MVC. I’m sure I’ll get flamed for this, but I’m *really* glad the web development I do is in ASP.NET.
Gotta say I felt the same. If that’s Easy Struts, I hate to imagine just how many lines of code doing anything hard would take.
There are beter MVC frameworks out there. use them. WebWork, Spring, Maverick etc.
“but I’m *really* glad the web development I do is in ASP.NET.”
That somehow tells me you don’t really know html and css, because half of the asp .NET stuff doesn’t even validate because of the viewstate (which even when turned off surpasses the maximum hidden field length)
Anyone have a comparison of frameworks handy? They all use current buzzwords, claiming to be better than the others. One area I suspect Struts has the advantage is documentation – quite a few books out targeting it.
i agree after finishing an application using tomcat/struts that struts is a little bit difficult to develop for and maintain esp when using lots of forms. Anyway i thought i read somewhere that the lead developer of struts is now working w/ sun on this http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/jstl/
-best
-greg
Some Struts tips: http://www.exadel.com have a visual struts product, similar to easy struts, called Struts Studio. You might like to examine it if you have some money to spend on your project. There is a downloadable time limited evaluation version.
Whilst there are indeed many books on Stuts they are mostly focused on the crufty Struts 1.0 and not the streamlined Struts 1.1. Consequently they make spend much time explaing how Struts works (MVC, Taglibs etc) and do a pretty poor job of explaining how to do real world programming with the toolkit.
The best in my opinion are the Manning offering, through but confused, and the recent pulp/e-book “Struts Survival Guide” from indi publisher http://www.objectsource.com. “SSG” is slightly week on the Struts taglibs (post JSTL so such a big deal) but very strong on the getting things done approach that other books miss. The e-version is a pretty good buy for 11USD.
Finally, whatever Struts limitations, one of its assets is the numer of interesting component and extension project built around it. For example take a look at these FOSS projects:
Struts workflow extention: http://www.livinglogic.de/Struts
and Stuts layout: struts.application-servers.com
If anyone is interested I’ll put up a more extensive links page to useful Struts stuff on my site (which runs on Maverick 🙂
Aidan
Are you sure you didn’t mean to say jsf? jstl is not a framework. Its just some taglibs for laying out jsp pages. Its fine, I have no complaints against jstl. Its not framework specific, but it is recommended that you layout your forms with jstl over the struts taglibs so you are less dependent on the framework in your “view”. However, ognl is a little more power full than the “el” expression language in jstl. Webwork2 tags and validation-xml files support ognl. In addtion, I believe ognl support is being added to http://displaytag.org as well.