Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2: a concise and practical tutorial: A step-by-step introduction to building Struts web applications for Java developers [Paperback]

Stephan Wiesner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 26, 2005

This book is designed as a rapid and effective Struts tutorial for Java developers. The book builds a fully-featured web bookstore application incrementally, with each stage described step-by-step. Concepts are introduced simply and clearly as the design and implementation of this sample project evolves. The emphasis is on rapid learning through clear and well structured examples. This book is written for Java developers planning to develop web applications, who are new to Struts. It expects familiarity with Java, JSP and Servlets to a degree, although more obscure elements are explained. It covers Struts 1.2.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stephan Wiesner was born in October 1973 in L¿neburg, Germany. He graduated in business informatics in 2003. He got introduced to Struts during his studies. He didn't understand the official documentation for Struts and therefore started to develop his own documentation. Feedback from all over the world encouraged him and finally he published it as a book. He currently lives and works in Lucerne, Switzerland, as a QS consultant and test manager.

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (August 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 190481154X
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811541
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,475,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Defeats its own goals, April 24, 2006

By 

Neil Roberts (Des Moines, IA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2: a concise and practical tutorial: A step-by-step introduction to building Struts web applications for Java developers (Paperback)

The author goes in to some detail about the philosophy of the book, how he intends to present it as a "action" oriented book, rather than a list of instructions. That's fine, but the actions that he presents are terrible.

I bought this book mostly to see what's changed since Struts 1, which is what I'm familiar with. I'm somewhat familiar with Struts 1.1, I've messed with DynaActionForm and some of the new validation features. So I know what Struts is capable of... and it's not this.

Struts is an excellent controller (the C in MVC), and it has a lot of really handy tags that you can use in your JSP pages. Where the author completely misses the mark is that he concentrates so heavily on the tags and very little on what makes Struts really powerful... its controller. That's not to say that he only concentrates on tags, he goes into great detail about integrating a database, writing a properties singleton, and other garbage that has nothing to do with struts.

He frequently uses a jsp page as the URL to visit to access a page. A good Struts implementation should rely COMPLETELY on Struts as its controller. This means that all of his pages should have been *.do pages. Not only does this allow for pre-render logic, but it means that you can switch out what JSP page you want to use without having to change your URL. It's pretty much the foundation of struts, and yet it's completely lost here.

Another thing I found missing was action-specific forwards. His action tags were almost all single, closed <action/> tags with no content in between. He opted instead to use global forwards for everything.

I'm not a genius, I obviously have something to learn about Struts if I'm still buying books. But Struts is about making things clean, abstracting the Model 1 grossness that JSPs introduced. This book is a piecemeal organization of some capabilities of Struts. Not only is this book lacking on any high-level struts capabilities, but I think it actually teaches bad programming.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Does well to get you quickly coding in Struts..., September 24, 2005

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2: a concise and practical tutorial: A step-by-step introduction to building Struts web applications for Java developers (Paperback)

If you already have a Java background and are looking to learn how to use Struts for web apps, a good concise tutorial title would be Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2 by Stephan Wiesner.

Contents: Introduction to Struts; Hello Struts; The Struts Shop; Internationalization and Taglibs; Logging and Configuration; Forms; Logic; Exceptions; Controller and Templates; Putting It All Together; Struts Validator and Plug-In Classes; JSTL; Tools and Tricks; Solutions; Glossary; Literature; Index

This is a 200 page tutorial that assumes a basic background in your IDE of choice and Java in general. It's written well, but there's not a lot of hand-holding going on. The author dives right in and brings you up to speed on the concepts you need to know to work with Struts. The associated platform choices are all open source (like Tomcat and MySQL), so it won't cost you anything to get started. Conversely, the coverage of these other software packages aren't covered in great detail. You're told where you can download the software, and quickly how to install it. If you have problems, you'll probably need to check out other sources to fix them. The book follows a common development project throughout (a book store application), so it does a nice job of building on itself as it goes along. Couple that with the exercises sprinkled throughout the book, and you should be able to learn enough to become competent on the basics. For long-term Struts work, you'll probably want to get a Struts reference book or check out the project website. Still, as a first book to learn by doing, Learning Jakarta Struts fairs well...

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A welcome introductory book to Struts, October 29, 2005

By 

Andrew Monkhouse (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2: a concise and practical tutorial: A step-by-step introduction to building Struts web applications for Java developers (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book, both Mr. Wiesner’s style of writing, and the way topics were introduced. The chapters are easy to read, and I never felt I was being lectured to. In addition, Mr. Wiesner has kept information relevant to the topic at hand without digressing into background information that might confuse newcomers. From as early as the second chapter you are developing in Struts, using a simple internationalization example. The chapters gradually build up from there, each one introducing new concepts in easy to read sections. By the end of the book, you will have created a simple bookstore application.

Mr. Wiesner assumes knowledge of Java, JSP, and Servlets, and expects you to have set up your JDK, Web Container, and Database before beginning. With this rudimentary knowledge, his introduction to Struts makes sense and examples are given demonstrating the differences between calling standard Java code from within a JSP and using the Struts equivalents.

My only complaints with this book are that the downloadable source code has not been converted into English (while the source code in the book has been) - this does not cause a major problem since the downloadable code is still very readable, but it does mean that the downloadable code does not exactly match the published code. Another issue is that the errata page does not appear to be regularly updated.

All in all, a very good book, and a welcome introductory book to Struts.