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Introduction to Struts

The Struts framework control layer uses technologies such as servlets, JavaBeans, and XML. The view layer is implemented using JSPs and tag libraries. The Struts architecture encourages the implementation of the concepts of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture pattern. By using Struts, you can get a clean separation between the presentation (view) and business logic (model) layers of your application.

Struts also speeds up Web application development by providing an extensive JSP tag library, parsing, and validation of user input, error handling, and internationalization support.

The focus of this chapter is on the Application Developer tooling used to develop Struts-based Web applications. Although we do introduce some basic concepts of the Struts framework, we recommend that you refer to the following sites for further in-depth information:

Apache Struts home page:

http://struts.apache.org/

Apache Struts User Guide:

http://struts.apache.org/userGuide/introduction.html

Note: Since the prior version of Application Developer (Version 6.x), Struts has forked into three distinct frameworks: Struts Classic (which is the original Struts framework) Struts 2 (which is Struts + Webwork) Struts Shale (which is a JSF version of Struts, now known as Shale) RAD v7.5 includes only support for Struts Classic. The versions supported by RAD are Struts 1.2 and 1.3. At the time of writing this book, the latest version of the Struts Classic framework was 1.3.8 for general availability and 1.3.9 in beta.

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