Re: Servlet Templates? Are they worth it? Struts

["Mark Phippard" <MarkP@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Plus I have a question about Struts...  What does that buy me?  What
> functionality does that allow me to have that just a normal jsp or
servlet
> doesn't offer... I read the user guide, but I just didn't grasp the
> purpose...

Struts is a framework that allows you to more easily develop applications
that follow the MVC (Model/View/Controller) design pattern.  Essentially,
Struts provides the Controller portion, leaving you to only have to provide
the Model and the View.

Struts also comes with a nice set of tag libraries that help you to
implement the View, and most importantly, to keep Java code out of your
JSP's.  The newer builds of Struts include another app called Tiles that
let you externalize the look and feel and layout of your pages in templates
that are applied at runtime.  This makes it easier to make look and feel
changes after the app is deployed.  Some others are working on ways to have
Struts spit out XML documents instead of JSP's, that are then sent to an
XSLT engine to apply the appropriate look and feel to the page.  In the
long term, this will probably be the ideal solution if you are into MVC.  I
really wonder what kind of processing power it will take though.

In short, Struts doesn't provide anything you couldn't do yourself, it
simply saves you some time and effort by having done an important chunk of
the work for you.  Besides, you can be pretty well assured that with the
number of people using it the code that comes with it is about as optimal
as you are going to get, while still providing an essentially 'soft-coded'
control environment.

Hope this helps.

Mark