Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2: a concise and practical tutorial: A step-by-step introduction to building Struts web applications for Java developers | Date: 28 April 2011, 06:57
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Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2: a concise and practical tutorial: A step-by-step introduction to building Struts web applications for Java developers
By Stephan Wiesner
* Publisher: Packt Publishing
* Number Of Pages: 220
* Publication Date: 2005-08-26
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 190481154X
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781904811541
Product Description:
A step-by-step introduction to building Struts web applications for Java developers
* Learn to build Struts applications right away
* Build an ecommerce store step-by-step using Struts
* Well-structured and logical progression through the essentials
In Detail
Jakarta Struts is an Open Source Java framework for developing web applications. By cleanly separating logic and presentation, Struts makes applications more manageable and maintainable.
Since its donation to the Apache Foundation in 2001, Struts has been rapidly accepted as the leading Java web application framework, and community support and development is well established.
Struts-based web sites are built from the ground up to be easily modifiable and maintainable, and internationalization and flexibility of design are deeply rooted. Struts uses the Model-View-Controller design pattern to enforce a strict separation between processing logic and presentation logic, and enables efficient object re-use.
The book is written as a structured tutorial, with each chapter building on the last. The book begins by introducing the architecture of a Struts application in terms of the Model-View-Controller pattern. Having explained how to install Jakarta and Struts, the book then goes straight into an initial implementation of the book store. The well structured code of the book store application is explained and related simply to the architectural issues.
Custom Actions, internationalization and the possibilities offered by Taglibs are covered early to illustrate the power and flexibility inherent in the framework. The bookstore application is then enhanced in functionality and quality through the addition of logging and configuration data, and well-crafted forms. At each stage of enhancement, the design issues are laid out succinctly, then the practical implementation explained clearly. This combination of theory and practical example lays a solid understanding of both the principles and the practice of building Struts applications.
What you will learn from this book?
* Understand the Model-View-Controller architecture and how it is implemented in Struts
* How to start building an application with Struts
* How to produce well-crafted and robust applications using sound software engineering practices
* How to build a complete application, in this case a web bookstore
Approach
The book sets out to get Java developers up to speed and confident with Struts as quickly as possible. It does not explain every feature in Struts, but takes a logical path through the essential information, with the emphasis on practical applications.
Who this book is written for?
This book is written for Java developers planning to develop web applications, who are new to Struts. It expects familiarity with Java, JSP and Servlets to a degree, although more obscure elements are explained. It covers Struts 1.2.
Summary: Too Concise to Be Practical
Rating: 2
I needed to get up to speed on Struts quickly. So when I saw this "concise and practical tutorial", I thought, Perfect. I'll read this to get a basic understanding, do the exercises to reinforce it, and if and when I need more background, theory, or detailed knowledge, I can eventually turn to one of the larger works.
Maybe it's just not possible to adequately cover Struts in such a short space. Or maybe the author just didn't do a very good job. I think it's probably a combination of the two. But in any case, this book just fails to deliver.
To begin with, let me how explain how concise "concise" is. Subtract out the intro, appendices, index, etc. and the book boils down to about 155 pages of content. About half of that is taken up by source code and configuration file samples plus screen shots of browser windows and other images. Another 15 pages are used to describe how to set up Tomcat and MySQL, plus the requirements and database schema for the sample online bookstore. Normally, all this is very welcome. The problem is, this leaves us with only about 60 pages of explanation of Struts itself, in a rather large typeset at that.
It's simply not enough, and the author seems to know it. In many cases, he refers the reader to outside sources for explanation. In a few case, those sources are discussion forum entries dating back to 2002 and 2003! (The book is copyrighted 2005). But even when the book provides explanations, they're often so brief and concise, that I often had to turn to the Strut's online user guide or other sources just to try and figure out what was going on.
To its credit, the book does cover the subjects of Internationalization and Logging early and with *relative* thoroughness. These are 2 features that developers can too easily postpone, and Wiesner's emphasis on designing with these in mind from the start is good advice. But again, it leaves you scratching your head why he puts relatively so little into explaining more core concepts, like the chain of events in a request, how to make non-trivial forms (e.g. with checkboxes or list boxes), proper separation of model and controller, what the RequestProcessor is and how to use it, etc.
I think this could have been a good book. The authors write well enough, but just not enough. Note: this book is translated from the German, which apparently is 264 pages, so maybe that's a better read.
Finally, although the book is entitled "Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2", I see no evidence of any 1.2 features in it. Even the 1.1 features are mostly just addressed at the end, suggesting he initially wrote the book with 1.0 in mind. The version number is not in the German title; it's probably fair to conclude that Packt Publishing put it into the title as a (deceptive) marketing ploy.
Bottom line: pass on this one and find something more thorough.
Summary: Defeats its own goals
Rating: 2
The author goes in to some detail about the philosophy of the book, how he intends to present it as a "action" oriented book, rather than a list of instructions. That's fine, but the actions that he presents are terrible.
I bought this book mostly to see what's changed since Struts 1, which is what I'm familiar with. I'm somewhat familiar with Struts 1.1, I've messed with DynaActionForm and some of the new validation features. So I know what Struts is capable of... and it's not this.
Struts is an excellent controller (the C in MVC), and it has a lot of really handy tags that you can use in your JSP pages. Where the author completely misses the mark is that he concentrates so heavily on the tags and very little on what makes Struts really powerful... its controller. That's not to say that he only concentrates on tags, he goes into great detail about integrating a database, writing a properties singleton, and other garbage that has nothing to do with struts.
He frequently uses a jsp page as the URL to visit to access a page. A good Struts implementation should rely COMPLETELY on Struts as its controller. This means that all of his pages should have been *.do pages. Not only does this allow for pre-render logic, but it means that you can switch out what JSP page you want to use without having to change your URL. It's pretty much the foundation of struts, and yet it's completely lost here.
Another thing I found missing was action-specific forwards. His action tags were almost all single, closed tags with no content in between. He opted instead to use global forwards for everything.
I'm not a genius, I obviously have something to learn about Struts if
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