Industries use frameworks for application development quite often.
For example: Java concepts like JSP, Servlet, Swing, Bean, JDBC can
be used directly to create web-applications but when such
applications become big, it becomes difficult to maintain and
develop them further. Hence, frameworks like struts are used to develop
large web-based Java applications. This makes maintenance and
further development easier. If you need to write a very simple web
application with a few pages, then you might consider using
JSP/Servlet directly otherwise Struts like frameworks are better
options.
Struts-1 uses the concept Model View Architecture (MVC) and provides
the controller. In MVC model, Model represents business logic, View
represents user interfaces, and Controller represents/controls control
flow of the application.
Struts' control layer is based on standard technologies like
Java Servlets, JavaBeans, ResourceBundles, and XML, as well as
various Apache Commons packages, like BeanUtils and Chain of
Responsibility.
For the Model, struts-1 framework can interact with standard
data access technologies, like JDBC and EJB, as well as most
any third-party packages, like Hibernate, iBATIS, or Object Relational
Bridge. For the View, the framework works well with JavaServer Pages,
including JSTL and JSF, as well as Velocity Templates, XSLT, and
other presentation systems.
The framework's Controller acts as a bridge between the application's Model and the web View.
When a request is received, the Controller invokes an Action class. The Action class consults
with the Model to examine or update the application's state. The framework provides an ActionForm
class to help transfer data between Model and View.
Struts-1 Configuration
-----------------------
web.xml is one of the configuration files. It is an XML-formatted file that works as a
deployment descriptor.
struts-config.xml is another resource file to initialize the applications resources.
These resources include ActionForms to collect input from users, ActionMappings
to direct input to server-side Actions, and ActionForwards to select output pages.
Sample struts-config.xml file.
?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
Other resources like Validators can be initialized here.
