David Kennedy wrote the following on 3/18/2005 9:01 PM:
Totally agree. For example, I did some work with Struts Layout:Treeview for my nav bar prototype. I very much appreciate volunteer effort, and don't wish to knock anyone's efforts, but I have to say that for a standard solution advocated by a couple of books it's fairly poor... There were a couple of immediate show-stoppers with working with the Treeview which was very disappointing. (Turns out the license precludes commercial use anyway.) The point of this isn't to knock Layout (again, I appreciate effort and feel guilty that I don't pay back into the commnunity that makes me fine tools), but rather to illustrate how something fairly standard - a treeview nav bar with a load of actions/forwards - is surprisingly difficult for a beginner with the toolkit to knock up cleanly.
But the above has never been the role of struts - to create view components. (JSF does have this kind of thing.) Struts obviously does have some tags for dealing with form properties (and some other tags that were more practical before the JSTL tags), but I've never thought of Struts being tied to components to make visual layout components. I therefore do not think it's fair to be knocking Struts on this ground since I never remember that being the intent of the framework. Yes, some nice people have worked on some of these things as side projects, but again that isn't the core of the framework so not really fair to knock it on those grounds.
I guess some of this cognitive whiplash comes from the fact that several of the core components are Very Cool. The core idea of the actions is just Very Sensible, the basic idea of using ResourceBundle keys everywhere Just Works, etc. I particularly like Validator, although I can see, as this thread is discussing, room for disagreement about alternative implementations. Custom rules are very nice, and very easily added.
Right, the above I'd agree are core components of Struts.
> I'm just troubled by the fact that most of the elements I find
straightforward and cleanly finished are those which my boss just doesn't see!
He he, such is life in the UI world:) I think my boss just thinks I build "web pages" </sigh> I've given up trying to even describe to managers what I do. After all, I'm just a UI guy... the DB guys are the "real" IT guys:) Hey, they need to keep up with a lot of different skill sets. Their job is easy compared to us. After all, we only need to keep up with Java, JSP, Tag libraries, XML, HTML, CSS, JS, DHTML, Flavor-of-the-month frameworks, app servers, etc etc </sarcasm>
> The basic project elements he wants in a couple of days -
that tree view in a readable/maintainable form, a nice simple PAM login & timeout mechanism* - turn into real timesinks.
If you describe more the login and timeout mechanism I'm sure we can have you set up quickly. The tree view thing again, I can't help with since I've never used and don't really see the struts toolkit as part of the framework.
This is a rather rude rant I know, and I appreciate people are scratching their own itches, but it would be nice to seem some concerted effort to solve some of the FAQs cleanly, and to generate more of a core catalogue of Patterns for noobs like myself. (Kudos to people like Ted Husted who do maintain some useful resources.) In that vein, I'm very much looking forwards to the new Struts Cookbook that O'Reilly have just put out, was rather hoping to see it in the post this morning. Might well answer lots of questions for me.
By the way, I have some real basic walk through tutorials that might help, but I think you are mostly past the stage of finding these useful, but just in case...
http://www.reumann.net/struts/main.do
-- Rick
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