Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
InfoQ spoke with Joe Walker at QCon London 2007 about the DWR toolkit. Walker discussed DWR 2.0 including new features such as details about 'reverse AJAX', the deal with TIBCO, DWR support in IDEs, the integration with Spring, future plans for DWR, and interesting applications of DWR from the very large to the very flashy.
The latest version of the Struts2 framework, version 2.1, has just been released. This release marks a significant upgrade, with changes being focused on refactoring more code into the plug-in framework, reducing XML configuration by adding a conventions plug-in, and improving REST support.
Struts is a Java framework based on standard Java technologies, such as Java Servlet, JavaBean, ResourceBundles and XML. Java developers have been enjoying Struts as a solid server side framework for many years. Recently, a technical evangelist for Adobe Systems, Anirudh Sasikumar, developed a new solution by integrating Flex as Struts' front end. Sasikumar calls it FxStruts.
Many developers faced with too many choices when selecting a web framework prefer to make the easy choice of using the framework they have used in the past or build their own. This is especially true for Java frameworks, as Neal Ford finds out; he also puts this paradox of choice in the context of other languages and draws some interesting and debatable conclusions.
In this third and final part of the Struts 2 migration series, Struts committer Ian Roughely completes the migration of a Struts app to Struts 2, by migrating the user interface - jsps & tags. This series teaches Struts 2 architecture & the differences in request processing as well as how to configure a Struts2 app and combine actions and JSP's.
In this part of the Struts 2 migration series, Struts committer Ian Roughely looks at a real application and compares the Struts and Struts 2 implementations, identifies how to convert actions, configuration changes, and what parts of the codebase don't need to be converted.
Struts committer Ian Roughely explains, from the perspective of a Struts developer, the high level architecture, basic request workflow, configuration semantics and differences in the action framework in the new Struts 2 (formerly WebWork). Armed with this knowledge, migrating an application of any size from Struts to Struts 2 should be simplified.
Patrick Lightbody does an overview of WebWork and the Struts merger, comparing to other web frameworks and explaining validation support, Ajax support, and how to achieve rapid development with WebWork/Struts 2.
Keith Donald goes in depth on Spring Web Flow, which solves the problem of orchestrating control navigations within a web application in Spring MVC, Struts, and JSF. Keith talks about how to design workflows in web apps and technical details such as how the flows are fault tolerant and how they integrate into web frameworks.
Within this book you will find everything you need to get up and running using Struts2 – from the architecture and configuration, to implementing actions and the supporting infrastructure such as validation and internationalization. Above all else, it focuses on the practical – with plenty of code and productivity tips to get you started using Struts2 today.
