Re: Servlet Templates? Are they worth it? Struts

["David Morris" <David.Morris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim,

We have been using Struts for close to a year now. The biggest
thing that Struts does is provide a standard way to implement a
Model View Controller architecture. Struts is roughly equivalent
to what DDS provides for display programs. If you are happy
with program described display files or use MI programs to
manipulate the 5250 data stream, don't bother looking at Struts.

For example, Struts has a validation framework that is similar to
the DDS validation keywords. It also give you a prebuilt input
buffer like DDS does. Like Mark said, you can build all of this
yourself, but Struts is written by people who know the Servlet
and JSP specs very well. Struts is also relatively lightweight.
There isn't a lot of excess baggage included in the core Struts
packages.

Struts 1.1 will be released in a few weeks, so if you are not
deeply involved by then, check back. Some items that may
or may not be included are dynabean support (good for
generic processing), validation extension (standard way,
even beyond Struts to do error checking), workflow support,
better behavior in containers, nested tags, and standardized
logging.

David Morris

>>> thatzenbeler@clinitech.net 03/08/02 12:22PM >>>
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I have been working with various templates  ie:  Velocity, Tea,
WebMacro
and I was wondering if the extra overhead was worth it?  I understand
that
this is a subjective question...  But I have been using net.data and I
love
it...  And these templates get me pretty close to the same look and
feel,
but there is more behind the scenes coding, and I was wondering what
people
thought about them...

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...


Thanks, for your time.... tim