Introduction

You often hear Struts referred to as a model-view-controller (MVC) framework for web applications. Struts can help you build web applications that separate the data (model) from the presentation (view); however, Struts doesn't provide a framework for the model. Rather, it supports custom Actions which broker the interaction between the view and model.

This chapter contains several recipes that offer different approaches to interacting with your application's model. You will find solutions related to accessing relational data by using JDBC and the popular Hibernate object/relational mapping framework. This chapter shows you ways to create pluggable interfaces for your business services. Finally, this chapter demonstrates some techniques for working with XML-based data stored in flat files.