Title: Struts 2 in Action
Author: Donald Brown,
           Chad Michael Davis,
           Scott Stanlick
Format: PDF
Publisher: Manning

Welcome to Struts 2! If you’ve picked up this book, we suspect you’re a Java developer
working with web applications who’s somehow or other heard about Struts 2. Perhaps
you’ve worked with the Struts 1 framework in the past, perhaps you’ve worked with
another framework, or perhaps this is your first step into Java web application develop-
ment. Whichever path has led you here, you’re probably looking for a good introduc-
tion to the new Struts 2 framework. This book intends to give you that introduction
and  much  more.  If  you’ve  never  heard  of  Struts  2,  we  cover  the  basics  in  enough
depth to keep you in tow. If you know what Struts 2 does, but want a deeper under-
standing of how it does it, we’ll provide that too.
 Struts 2 is a Java web application framework. As you know, the Java world is vast
and a Struts 2 application may travel far and wide in this world of Java. With that said,
one of the biggest challenges faced by a Struts 2 book arises from trying to determine
what content to include. This book could have been three times as long if we’d taken
all  of  the  good  advice  we  received  about  what  to  include.  We  apologize  to  those
whose course of normal development takes them outside the boundaries of our con-
tent. Please believe us when we say that we agonized over what to include and what
not to include.
 Struts 2 is much more than a revision of the Struts 1 framework. If you hadn’t yet
heard anything about Struts 2, you might expect, based upon the name, to find a new
release of that proven framework. But this is not the case. Its relationship to that older
framework  is  based  in  philosophy  rather  than  in  code  base.  Struts  1  was  an  action-
oriented framework that implemented a Model-View-Controller (MVC) separation of
concerns  in  its  architecture.  Struts  2  is  a  brand  new  implementation  of  those  same
MVC principles in an action-oriented framework. While the general lay of the land will
seem familiar to Struts 1 developers, the new framework contains substantial architec-
tural differences that serve to clean up the MVC lines and make the development pro-
cess all that more efficient. We cover the new framework from the ground up, taking
time to provide a true introduction to this new technology while also taking pains to
give an inside view.
 The organization of this book aims to walk you through Struts 2 in a sequence of
increasing complexity. We start with a couple of preliminary chapters that introduce
the technological context of the framework, give a high-level overview of the architec-
ture,  and  present  a  bare-bones  HelloWorld  sample  application  to  get  your  environ-
ment up and running. After this brief introduction, we set off into a series of chapters
that cover the core concepts and components of the framework one by one. We take
time to explain the functionality of each component in depth. We also provide real
code examples as we begin the development of our full-featured sample application,
the Struts 2 Portfolio. Finally, the later chapters provide some advanced techniques
for  tweaking  a  bit  more  out  of  the  core  components,  as  well  as  introducing  some
advanced features of the framework such as plug-ins and Spring integration.

Download the free ebook: Struts 2 in Action (May 2008).pdf