Phillip's Blog

Strutting your web application

Jakarta Struts probably is the most famous web application framework in the Java Community. Although it has some good features many others are more or less neglectable.
Considering Struts as your web application framework you should be aware of some important issues.
The Struts implementation is not as one might want it to be. For example it doesn't support interceptors for request parameter binding. Such a mechanism is required if you need to seemlessly convert data formats before storing the data in transfer objects (in Struts called FormBeans). Furher implementation details make the web programmer's life more uncomfortable. Because of forcing FormBeans to be derived from a special base class, it keeps the FormBean from being reused in the ejb tier, if you did't want to have dependencies from the ejb tier the web tier. That's when you start some wild data copying.
Struts does not support any output formatting required by many web applications. For that purpose you have to add formatted output methods for each attribute that has to be formatted.
I could continue the list. Most of my points are valid for Struts 1.0.2 as well as for Struts 1.1. Even if Struts had some good features it doesn't have to be so large.
If I was again in a project thinking about using Struts as a third party library - without adapting it to the project's needs, I probably would not use Struts.

An alternative could be Tapestry that's becoming a Jakarta project, too. Though it probably takes more time than Struts to master. If I had to stick to Struts, I'd just use a well-defined and adapted subset.