Jean-Baptiste Nizet wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I just noticed that there is an article talking about Struts on JavaWorld, at
> http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2000/jw-1201-struts.html, written by
> Thor Kristmundsson, from ATG. This shows, once again, that Struts is more and
> more used and recognized in the Java community.
> Unfortunately, the article, IMHO, shows exactly what should NOT be done with
> Struts. The MVC pattern is broken (no real form bean, controller code in the JSP
> page, direct forwards to JSP pages, ...), the validation process of Struts is
> bypassed and re-invented, the error management is also re-invented, and this is
> done by modifying the Struts sources, instead of trying to enhancing it by
> adding or extending classes.
>
> What do you all think about it?
>
> I personnally think that someone knowing Struts perfectly (Craig, are you
> here?), should react to this article and show how all this could be done using
> Struts in a smart way, and explain what the real Struts is able to do.
>
> JB.
I don't have a particular problem with the idea of someone taking a package and
customizing it. This is, after all, an open source project. (It would be nice,
however, if changes and enhancements were proposed back to the community :-).
I do have a problem with the way the example is coded -- it utilizes two techniques
(posting back to the same JSP page, and embedding functional logic as scriptlets
rather than custom tags) that are really not in the spirit of what Struts tries to
do.
I am aware of several article and book projects in the works that will deal with
Struts. All of the ones I know about plan to cover the "Struts story" in a way that
is more philosophically aligned with the application architecture that Struts
enables (which this article, as is stated at the beginning, doesn't really utilize).
As Thor can undoubtedly tell you, writing a good article is a time consuming
exercize. I think that the Struts community might feel like lynching me if I
started writing articles about Struts before getting 1.0 done :-). After that,
we'll see ...
Craig
