Product Description
Web tier frameworks have really taken off in the past year or so. Developers who used to spend hours and hours writing low-level features have realized the enormous benefits of using well-written frameworks to build the presentation tier so they can get to coding the "good stuff", the business logic at the core of the program.
The Struts Framework, originally created by Craig R. McClanahan and donated to the Apache Software Foundation's Jakarta project in 2000, has become one of the most popular presentation frameworks for building web applications with Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology. It encourages application architecture based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm, colloquially known as the Model 2 approach.
As popular as Struts is becoming, the online documentation is inadequate, focusing on the most basic functionality and leaving out information crucial to developers writing today's complex web applications. O'Reilly's Programming Jakarta Struts was written by Chuck Cavaness after his internet company decided to adopt the framework, then spent months really figuring out how to use it to its fullest potential. He calls the books, "the culmination of lessons learned (the hard way) during the building of our application."
Readers will benefit from the real-world, "this is how to do it" approach Cavaness takes to developing complex enterprise applications using Struts, and his focus on the 1.1 version of the Framework makes this the most up-to-date book available.
Programming Jakarta Struts covers:
- An overview of the concepts involved in writing web applications
- Detailed installation and configuration instructions to get Struts up and running quickly
- A thorough discussion of how Struts implements the Model-View-Controller pattern, and how to interface with that pattern in your own applications
- JSP and Jakarta Tag Libraries for authoring complex web pages
- Logging, Validation, and Exception Handling with Struts
- Using the new Struts template framework, Tiles.
- Writing internationalization and localization code using Struts
- Practical, real-world best practices for web applications
About the Author
Chuck Cavaness is a graduate from Georgia Tech with degrees in computer engineering and computer science, has built Java-based enterprise systems in the healthcare, banking, and B2B sectors. Working at an Internet company to design and develop software architecture, Chuck has spent many frustrating hours figuring out the dos and the don'ts of web applications. With each enterprise system he's developed, Chuck has learned several valuable lessons about building "real-world" web applications, information that he's made available to developers who haven't had the opportunity to work on large systems. Chuck is the co-author of Special Edition Using Java 1.3 and Special Edition Using EJB 2.0, both available from QUE.
Excerpted from Programming Jakarta Struts by Chuck Cavaness. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Up to this point, not much has been said about how to organize and assemble the content and layout of JSP pages for a Struts application. In many ways, that is outside the scope of the topic of Struts. Many excellent books are available that provide strategies for organizing web content and the layout of pages.
In the Storefront application, we have used two different approaches to assembling web pages. The first approach, sometimes referred to as a straight JSP-based approach, is probably the most familiar to web designers. The JSP pages contain presentation logic along with HTML layout tags; there's no separation of the two. This approach is typically used for smaller, less complicated web applications.
The second approach uses the JSP include directive. It's used by developers for larger web applications, or after they realize how repetitive the first approach can be. If you have spent much time maintaining web applications, you know how frustrating it can be to update a site's look and feel. Using the JSP include directive allows for more reuse, which reduces the total development and maintenance costs.
A third approach, which is introduced in this chapter, describes a far better way to reduce the amount of redundant code a web application contains and, at the same time, allows you to separate the content from the layout better than the first two approaches.
Understanding Templates
Traditional GUI toolkits such as VisualWorks Smalltalk or Java Swing all provide some type of layout manager that dictates how content should be displayed within the frame or window. With typical web sites, the layout can undergo many changes, both small and large, over its lifetime. Using layouts and layout managers can help to encapsulate the physical areas of the pages within an application so that they can be altered with minimal impact to the rest of the application. Unfortunately, the JSP technology does not natively provide any direct support for layouts or layout managers. This is why the template-based approach was invented. The concept of templates is not a new one--it has been around for many years, in one form or another.
To understand how templates can actually simplify a web site's layout, let's compare it with an approach that uses the JSP include mechanism. The current index.jsp page of the Storefront application is shown in Example 14-1.
Example 14-1: The index.jsp page for the Storefront application
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-html.tld" prefix="html" %>
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-logic.tld" prefix="logic" %>
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-bean.tld" prefix="bean" %>
<html:html>
<head>
<title><bean:message key="global.title"/></title>
<html:base/>
<script language=javascript src="include/scripts.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="stylesheets/format_win_nav_main.css" type="text/css">
Although the main page uses the JSP include directive, the layout is mixed with content in the page. For example, notice that the page specifies explicitly that the head.inc include file comes first, then the menubar.inc file, the mainoffer.inc file, and so on, right down to the copyright.inc include at the bottom of the page. For every page that we want to have this particular layout, we need to add the same statements in the same order. If a customer wants the menu along the left side instead of across the top, every page will have to be changed.
The Storefront application uses the JSP include mechanism rather than a straight JSP approach. Although the include mechanism is a step in the right direction because it does reduce redundancy (imagine if we included the copyright content in every page!), it's still less efficient than a template-based approach.
