No, Struts is definitely not dead.
=:) Those rumors have been greatly exaggerated! The Struts Committers have been a bit busy the last year or so with parceling Struts into Commons components and all. But the Struts Community has been shipping, shipping, shipping.
For example, Don Brown is shipping extensions for using Struts with Cocoon and the Bean Scripting Framework, and as of today, Wildcard Actions. Mathias just released an update to his very useful workflow extension. James keeps bringing out Console after Console. Just to name a few. (Need to get that Resource page updated before final ships!)
And of course, there are the long-standing XLST, Velocity, SSL, and JUnit extension for Struts, doclet extensions for Struts, database extension for Struts, and surely many things I haven't heard of yet!
And, as Craig pointed out, Struts is not the only place where people are developing MVC frameworks. WebWorks demonstrated the usefulness of a unified Controller (or "Action") objects. Other frameworks like Maverick and JPublish are showing us how very different approaches to handling actions (as well as screens) can all be used within the same framework.
The point is that no matter how good JSF will be, or how good Struts is now, there will always be "more dreamed of" than what we happen to stuff in our distributions! There will always be gaps where open-source developers, like us, can jump in and start sharing our solutions.
This is true not only of Java, but of any platform. For example, most of us know that .NET lacks many of the high-level tools we all use and love. OSS, like nature, abhors a vacuum. So, OSS volunteers have been busily porting many of our favorite tools "to the dark side". Packages like Maverick, Velocity, and Log4*, again to name a few, are all now making life easier for our .NET brethen. OSS works because places like the ASF and SourceForge *let* it work. And it works everywhere, even on vendor "strangle-hold" platforms like .NET.
Over the past three years, the 40+ developers who have directly contributed to Struts -- and the thousands of others who helping out on Bugzilla, and the list, and the other support forums -- have proven (once again) that community-supported development does work, and that we'd all be poorer without it!
New specifications, like JSF, just give us fertile new ground where we can continue to do what we do best -- share the wealth!
Some things never change =:)
-Ted.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
