On 6/23/07, Martin Gilday <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is something I have been thinking about for a while, but has been highlighted by Wicket recently graduating from the Apache Incubator. When checking out blogs, newsgroups, theserverside, infoq etc it has become apparent to me that Struts 2 is still very much thought of as just Struts 1++, in a negative sense.
Thanks to Google alerts, I've been reading a lot of the blogs and such all along. I would agree that many people perceive Struts 2 as Struts 1++. I would even say that label is a fair assessment, and even a goal of the merger. If there's a negative sense, it's a statement about action-based frameworks, as opposed to component-based or Ajax-based frameworks. I wouldn't take it personally. :) The nature of the beast is that most blogs are about some shiny new toy, which can even include Struts 2, for example: http://www.vitarara.org/cms/struts2cookbook
When you see posts by people saying which web frameworks they have tried out because they were unhappy with Struts 1 then Wicket, Click, Tapestry are mentioned. Struts 2, however, is always seemingly dismissed without a look, as they feel all the problems they have with Struts 1 must still exist.
Oh, judging by the download stats, I think a few people are checking out Struts 2 :) In March 2007, right after the release of 2.0.6, Struts 2 had its largest spike of downloads ever! We didn't edge out Tomcat, but we did briefly edge out Apache HTTPD :) And, honestly, before today, I never even thought to look :)
Of course there is plently on info on the wiki detailing why they are different, but if they have already crossed it off the list before getting to the site it isn't much use in getting the message across. I'm not really sure what my point is as the name is the name now. Maybe some positive marketing such as some blog posting about the improvements and differences, or in release annoucements really strongly detailing them.
We did try to highlight the differences and improvements in the initial announcement. * http://struts.apache.org/announce.html#a20070223 which many people cribbed word for word. If there are any suggestions about what we could highlight differently, the RM is usually looking for help with drafting the release announcement. If we had a marketing budget, an announcement about the record downloads for Struts 2 might be an interesting idea. But, it actually costs money to send out a press release these days :) I'm checking with the Apache Stats groups to make sure I'm reading the graphs right. Then I'll at least post something to our site, which other people might pickup. For example, InfoQ might want to do something to promote Ian's book, and we could piggy back on that. -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
