Summary

Before embarking on a major project, it is always beneficial to evaluate off-the-shelf or out-of-box solutions that address a significant part of the requirements. Implementing MVC semantics for a request/response-based HTTP protocol demands significant investment of time and effort. Selecting a suitable framework for solving this problem provides a head start for a project while allowing the architects and developers to focus on realizing the business use cases rather than integration semantics. This chapter has provided insight into Struts framework, its MVC semantics, its configuration semantics, and the core services it offers out-of-box. The knowledge gained from this chapter is instrumental in designing and implementing the presentation tier components of Chapter 5. Chapter 5 will also cover the Struts Validator for declarative form validation. More information on Struts and the related configuration and installation instructions can be found at http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/userGuide/index.html. Because Struts development is an ongoing endeavor, it is likely that by the time you read this chapter, some of the implementation may change, therefore it is best to complement the information provided in this chapter with release notes and updates posted at http://jakarta.apache.org/struts.