I haven't used Struts, but may for my next website-it looks very
promising and does a lot of things I've been "inventing" myself.
> it seems that in order to use this software you need jar files,
> a bunch of tag-libs, some configuration files, etc. Also, when
> developing with it, you need to generate a plethora of application
> files, one bean for each form, one action class for every action,
> not to mention business logic beans and jsp files.
Yes, it does "require" a lot of supporting infrastructure. But I
_haven't_ been using it and have duplicated a _lot_ of work that
has already been done (I didn't _know_ it then, of course :/
I rapidly moved from JSP-as-a-page-scripting-language with all logic
on the page to servlets doing form processing (for all but the simplest
actions this is the only thing that makes sense) and some business logic
(for example, I have a servlet that does banner ad rotation/metering).
The JSP/tag is really best at showing what has happened, not actually
making it happen.
> Isn't this a little much just to functionally separate out the
> components of your software. Can someone offer some advice.
Nope. In fact, it might not even be enough ;)
In order to keep the page designers happy ("program logic? what the...?")
it's completely necessary to provide them only with perhaps a bean to
show error messages and current form values. Their little heads start
to spin around real quick-like when given more than that.
In addition, maintaining the entire site structure becomes much easier
(in my experience, anyway) once the model is understood. Instead of
having to make sure that my presentation page currently reflects my
business logic, I just have to make sure that the designer knows what
can be given to the page and that I provide those things.
(I'd also like to point out that anything you can do in XML becomes
self-documenting with the appropriate XSLTs and/or other XML manipulation
tools. Very cool. As an example, I currently create my tags.tld file from
an "uber-tags" file, from which I also create HTML documentation... I do
both using pretty simple XSLTs (the ubertags-to-tags.tld just being
stripping stuff out.))
I'm tough to impress, but the servlet/JSP model has been one of the coolest
ways I've ever seen to do web stuff. Throwing a nice hierarchy on top of
that is a Really Good Idea, IMNSHO :)
Dave
