Professional Jakarta Struts

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James Goodwill

Richard Hightower

Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Published by
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
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Copyright © 2004 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN: 0-7645-4437-3

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Credits

Authors
James Goodwill
Richard Hightower

Executive Editor
Robert Elliot

Production Editor
Vincent Kunkemueller

Technical Editors and Reviewers
Andy Barton
Erik Hatcher
Craig Pfeifer

Copy Editor
Elizabeth Welch

Vice President & Executive Group Publisher
Richard Swadley

Vice President & Executive Publisher
Robert Ipsen

Vice President & Publisher
Joseph B. Wikert

Executive Editorial Director
Mary Bednarek

Editorial Manager
Kathryn A. Malm

Compositor
Amy Hassos

Book Producer
Ryan Publishing Group, Inc.

About the Authors

James Goodwill

James Goodwill is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Virtuas Solutions, LLC, located in Denver, Colorado. With over 10 years of experience, James leads Virtuas' Senior Internet Architects in the development of cutting-edge tools designed for J2EE e-business acceleration.

In addition to his professional experience, James is a member of the JSP 2.0 Expert Group (JSR-152.) He is the author of the best-selling Java titles Developing Java Servlets, Pure JavaServer Pages, Apache Jakarta Tomcat, and Mastering JSP Custom Tags and Tag Libraries. James is also a regular columnist on the Java community Web site, OnJava.com.

More information about James, his work, and his previous publications can be found at his company's web site, www.virtuas.com.

Rick Hightower

Rick Hightower (www.rickhightower.com) is a developer who enjoys working with Java, J2EE, Ant, Struts, Web Services and XDoclet. Rick is also the CTO of Trivera Technologies (www.triveratch.com), a global training, mentoring, and consulting company focusing on enterprise development. Rick is a regular contributor to IBM developerWorks and has written more than 10 IBM developerWorks tutorials on subjects ranging from EJB to Web Services to XDoclet to Struts to Custom Tags.

While working at eBlox, Rick and the eBlox team used Struts and J2EE to build two frameworks and an ASP (application service provider) for online ecommerce stores. They started using Struts long before the 1.0 release.

Rick recently helped put together a well-received course for Trivera on Struts that runs on Tomcat 4.x, Resin EE 2.x, IBM WebSphere 5.0 (WSAD), JBoss 3.x, and WebLogic 8.1. When not traveling around the country teaching the Trivera Struts course (our bestseller), speaking at conferences about Struts, or doing Struts consulting and mentoring, Rick enjoys drinking coffee at an all night coffee shop and writing code, writing about Struts and other Java, J2EE and XP topics, and writing about himself in the third person.

Dedication

To my girls, Christy, Abby, and Emma

—James Goodwill

To my sons, Dante, Ryan, and Richard Jr., and my lovely first-born Whitney Marie. And, to the memory of Dave Richardson and Lou Souza; mentors and friends

—Rick Hightower

Acknowledgments

I would like to begin this text by thanking the people who made this book what it is today. They are the people who took my words and shaped them into something that I hope will help you use and develop Jakarta Struts applications. Of these people, I would like to especially thank Tim Ryan, and Liz Welch. They both contributed considerably to what I hope is a successful book. I would also like to thank Rick Hightower for his incredible contributions of Chapters 5, 12, 13, and 21. He work is an invaluable addition to this text.

On a closer note, I would like to thank everyone at my company, Virtuas Solutions, LLC, for their support while I was completing this text. The entire "UNREAL" staff contributed by picking up my assignments when my plate was too full.

Finally, the most important contributors to this book are my wife, Christy, and our daughters, Abby and Emma. They are the ones who really sacrificed during the development of this text, and they are the ones who deserve the credit for this book. Without their support, this text would be a collection of words that made very little sense.

—James Goodwill

Thanks to James Goodwill and Tim Ryan for inviting me to the party (okay I begged Tim and James, but still). I really enjoyed reading James Goodwill's other books and it is a real pleasure working with him. Tim Ryan is an amazingly talented editor who makes me look much smarter than I am.

I'd like to thank the eBlox team (Andy Barton et al) who helped review my chapters. I learned Struts while working at eBlox. Pair programming with Nick Nicholas Lesiecki, Erik Hatcher, Andy Barton, Paul Visan, and more at eBlox helped us all learn Struts long before Struts 1.0. Special thanks to the famed XDoclet, Struts, and Ant expert, Erik Hatcher whose critical eye made my chapters much more detailed and accurate. It is good to have Erik as a friend.

Thanks to my wife Kiley and kids for sacrificing time with me so I could work on this book. Last but not least, I'd like to thank the Trivera Technologies Team and Kimberly Morello who gave me some schedule flexibility so I could work on this book. Thanks to our clients, where I learned a lot of new Struts tricks while training Struts, and mentoring and consulting on Struts projects. Okay one more: Thanks to the Struts contributors who provided a great framework to build J2EE web applications.

—Rick Hightower

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