The Parable of the Carpenter


The Parable of the Carpenter

Anyone who has been around the software integration business for a while can attest to one truism. The choices you make at the beginning of your project, when you're assembling the toolkit that will provide the foundation of your endeavor, are some of the most crucial.

Imagine you're building a house. You have a 2x4 that you want to nail to a beam. There are people out there who, lacking a hammer , would grab the nearest rock and start wailing away. Others, distrustful of store-bought hammers, would construct a forge and fashion their own hammer to their own precise specifications. Still other people might rush down to their local hardware store and buy the fanciest laser-leveled battery- powered auto-hammer they could get. Finally, a seasoned carpenter might take the trusty hammer that he knows like the back of his hand from his belt, and drive that nail straight and true.

The analogy holds true for software engineers . Some use the most primitive tools that can possibly get the job done. (You tend to find them still implementing Web sites using CGI scripts written in C, but the raw JSP crowd is rapidly joining their ranks.) Still others take the not-invented-here approach and create their own application infrastructure. You also find those who are enamored of the latest (and usually most expensive) buzzword -laden products. Finally, you find the veterans who have slowly developed an arsenal of trusted tools over time.

The advantage to using a toolset (or framework) is that you get the benefit of all the work that's been put into it by other people, just like you, solving problems just like yours. You usually get a huge step up because a lot of the gruntwork has already been done for you. You can probably learn an already existing database connection-pooling package faster than you can write your own, for example.

Struts is an example of such a framework. It was developed in response to an increasingly common problem in Web site development using Java. As a site grows in complexity, it becomes more and more difficult to manage the relationship between the various JSP pages, the backend business logic, and the forms and validations that move you around the site. As a result, many JSP sites end up looking like the Web equivalent of spaghetti code. Struts centralizes and standardizes this entire ball of wax.

But Struts is much more than just a framework that gets you started quickly. It's also a collection of best practices. Why build something on your own when some of the best JSP developers in the world (literally) have worked so hard to lay out a path for you to follow?



Struts Kick Start
Struts Kick Start
ISBN: 0672324725
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 177

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