Vita Rara: A Life Uncommon - Struts

A Weekend with WebWork

Mark — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 07:51:16 -0400

I spent the better part of the weekend with "WebWork in Action" by Partick Lightbody and Jason Carreira. I did this because WebWork 2.3 == Struts 2. I wanted to come up to speed on this to make sure that I was not leaving something behind. Originally it was my plan to implement Quadran with JSF, but I'm unsure of that plan. It's a very large change for us as an organization, therefore I'm taking a more detailed survey of the landscape to see where the web framework world is.

As I've said in the past we have been a Struts 1.2 house for some time now. I do feel though that Struts 1 has run its course and that basing a new project on it would be short sighted, although I'm sure it would work, as Struts 1 is a proven framework. Therefore the evaluation of the options.

Web Frameworks

Mark — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:23:30 -0400

Some history. I've worked on two major projects in the past few years. One of them was written using the Enhydra presentation framework with XMLC. The other one, which I had a large part in specifying, but not writing, uses Struts for the web framework.

So, now that I'm starting with a clean sheet I'm taking a serious look at what is out there. My original inclination was to use Struts 1.2 and then back my way into another frame work down the road. I figured that in the long run we'd likely port to JSF.

Well, I've spent a lot of time with "Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework" by Rod Johnson, et. al., over the past week and I really like what I'm reading. It has me seriously rethinking my decision to use Struts 1.2.

Frameworks, API's, Interfaces.... Oh My! Defining a Foundation

Mark — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:36:17 -0400

One of the most important issues when starting a new project is the question of what tools, frameworks, and libraries are you going to use. In the past when starting a new project I take some time and survey the lay of the land. Well.. it's day one and I have been closely surveying the lay of the land.

It has been my intention that I would be using EJB 3.0 for this project, at least for the persistence layer. I have been looking at it for some time. I still feel comfortable with that decision. I've looked at Hibernate, which was the other possibility, but I think that EJB 3.0 will do for us.