Professional Struts Applications (Expert's Voice) [Paperback]

The remainder of the book focuses of the application of struts and other jakarta projects to successfully avoid the previously discussed antipatterns. To accomplish this the book provides a fully functional, downloadable companion application (downloaded from the wrox website). The power in this is that it provides for a very interractive teaching method... by example. This was far superior to the majority of other books I have read which provide only small non-cohesive code tidbits scattered throughout the text.

Reading this book has allowed me to go from having only a limited knowledge about jakarta, to being somewhat confident with implementing a basic web application utilizing jakarta projects including struts and applying j2ee design patterns.

You must be familiar with servlets, jsp, and tomcat (or another servlet container) prior to reading and applying this book. It is definitely not for a j2ee novice.

My only complaint about this book is the number of typos and errors in the text. I have found countless errors in the text and diagrams which have at times made understanding it difficult. Most of these are not even listed on the errata section of the book's website.

The book is broken up into five sections. The first and longest section discusses Struts. This section is very good as it concentrates on developing a Struts application and demonstrates good design while discussing the issues that make bad designs bad. This section ends with a look at using ObjectRelationalBridge (OJB) as a data access tier. Unfortunately the book uses an beta version of OJB (it is still not in release) that makes this section obsolete. The remaining chapters cover other open source tools available to developers including Velocity (template engine), Lucene (search engine), and Ant (build tool). Although it is interesting to see how each tool integrates into the Struts application developed earlier, the chapters are not long enough to give detailed information on any of these tools.

The conclusion is that if you are looking for a book on properly building a Struts application, you probably want to wait for the second edition. Since the OJB chapter is obsolete and the chapters on the other tools are fairly brief, this book doesn't provide anything that shouts, "Buy Me" from the shelves.

The first chapter is a nice read and while it's covered everywhere else, they cover MVC well and how it relates to the struts framework.

My biggest pet peeve is with one of what is otherwise their most useful chapter on prepopulating forms and setting forms up. In chapter 2 they talk about the concepts of pre and post setup actions (post as in after). Then in chapter 3 they use a PostStory example (post as in posting an ad, but then again it could be like the post form submit method). They have a PostStorySetupAction and with all the meanings of posts I had trouble not seeing it as an after[post]-before[setup] action. My brain core dumped and in the end I went back with a pen and marked out "post" everywhere in the chapter. If only they could have used AddStory or CreateStory, or I could forget the other overloaded meanings of post I wouldn't have had to reread that chapter.

The one time the book came to the rescue was when trying to mix the validator framework validation with custom validation. extending the ValidatorForm instead of ActionForm was exactly what we needed.