Customer Reviews

Practical Apache Struts2 Web 2.0 Projects (Practical Projects)

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3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was extremely disappointed in the authors other struts 2 book; and was planning to avoid this one, but all the other stuts 2 books kept slipping their date, so I picked this one up on a whim.

I'm rather surprised by the negative reviews people are giving it, as I found it a very useful book. Yes the title is a little hokey and the content only pays lip-service to Web 2.0 aspects. I have been working on my own personal projects in Struts 2 for a few months so I wasn't a complete novice coming into the book, and I lurk on both the users and developer mailing lists. I felt the material was well laid out and followed a natural progression. The book doesn't really cover MVC theory nor how it applies to any of the "Action" frameworks, so its not really a book for people with no prior experience in those areas.

The other limitation I found was the book just ends. There was no real wrap up or conclusion. Basically he finishes developing the last use case of this sample application and on the facing page is the index. To me this was the only place that felt rushed.

The book doesn't cover a fair bit of the annotation based configuration opposed to XML and a few of the more established plugins however that are a few places where it might not be "future-proof" given the works that's going on now merging/combining several of the convention-over-configuration plugins into a single unified one for struts 2.1

I am starting to program in struts, and definitively this is not the book I was looking for. First, it talks about Ruby on Rails so good that I'm thinking if I should move to that instead keeping studying Struts. Second, the first example have soooo many assumptions that it is impossible fo follow. Thrid, the rest of the book appear to be complex as if you already were a master of struts 1.

I discourage this book.

Like others said its not for beginners. However, that doesn't make it a bad book. If you are looking for guide for going to struts 1 to 2, this book is not it. With that said, if you are a webwork developer or already have a handle on the Struts 2 basics this book does provide some nice samples. It provides a nice sampling of how to integrate with some of the plugins that have been added over the last year. (zero config, wild cards in configuration, gwt, hibernate, spring, security). You may already be an accomplished struts 2 development however, their may be some things to take away from this to add to one's cookbook.

I have read a lot of technical books, and I found this one hard to follow and hard to understand. Compared to WebWork In Action, this book has done a horrible job on explaining Struts2's architect and underline terminologies. Perhaps, Struts 2 is a multihead animal framework, or the topics on Struts2 need more than 326 pages to explain.

Some Positives:
This is a very good book to learn the integrations of struts 2, with Spring, and Hibernate. There are a many samples of how to tie some of the Web 2.0 technologies together and that is very hard to find in other books. Most other books i have looked at put the blinders on when looking at this framework and ignore the need for other integrations. (as everyone else has stated THIS IS NOT FOR BEGINNERS and an understanding of Hibernate, Struts, and Spring is recommended )

Some Negatives:
Although it gives examples of how to tie some projects together it does not go into implementation details of any other project (struts only) there by leaving you hanging. So unless you are familiar with Hibernate, Spring, Velocity ect, and how to set them up this book will be very difficult to follow.

I think the place where people will be frustrated most is in chapter 4. It talks about creating a UML model "and through some magic" the Persistence classes get generated. Nowhere does it talk about the generation of hbm files or how they translate to the export of the schema. And without that understanding it is very difficult to get past chapter 4.

This book obviously had absolutely no proofreading.
THE SOURCE CODE DOES NOT WORK!!!! I fixed the obvious typos such as setting the database name as "APP2S" on some pages and "app2s" on others and spelling partial as "patial" in some places (the source code actually fixes this by using "patial" in other places) and it still wouldn't run. I have worked on it for a long time and have learned a lot about struts 2 by reading other well-written books. Unfortunately, they never helped me get past the null pointer exception that occurs with the Source Code. By commenting out the validating logic in the problem class I was able to get further in the book and actually make most of the application run. This was not because of things learned from this book, but from reading other well-written and well-proofread books.

I wrote to the author regarding this problem and his response was to ask what Struts version and what java version I was using. This was unbelievable!!! What planet is he from???? I was using his source code which was designed for maven and has a pom.xml which SETS THE JAVA VERSION AND THE STRUTS VERSION to the SAME VERSION THAT HE USED!!!

I hesitated writing this review, but when the author STONEWALLS me like this I feel a duty to WARN PROSPECTIVE PURCHASERS.

I cant' believe he ever ran this source code personally, BECAUSE IT DOES NOT WORK!!!!

I note that some of the other reviews say this book is not for beginners. That is not the problem as you can take any other book and figure out what you need to know to make the examples work; it just takes a little longer if you are a beginner. I will admit I am new to Struts 2 but have used mvc frameworks extensively in the past. I have read Struts2 in Action, Apache Struts2 Web Application Development, Struts 2 Design and Programming, and Struts2 for Beginners without any problems like this.

I am surprised Apress allowed this book to be published as I have found other Apress books to be very helpful. I have never had this type of problem with an Apress book before, but this definitely hurts their credibility with me.

This book has absolutely nothing to commend it. If you buy this book, you will be disappointed!!!

"Practical Apache Struts2 Web 2.0 Projects" walks you through developing an app in Struts2. It includes use cases, iterations, a build process and some unit tests.

A number of other reviews correctly point out this book is not for beginners. You should be familiar with MVC before starting out. This was ok as I wasn't expecting an "intro to struts 2" book based on the title. The author includes a section on Hibernate bare essentials to get readers with different experience on the same page.

I found there to be a good balance between how Struts 2.0 works and implementing common things you might actually want to do in practice. While the book does cover Web 2.0 a bit, this is more of an extra buzzword in the title. The last two chapters are really the Web 2.0 part - RSS and AJAX.

The end left me a little off balance. There was a whole chapter of introduction. The end was the AJAX chapter and the immediately dumped you in the index. A bit of conclusion, or at least a blank page, would have been nice.

Overall, the book was fine. It is good for a "recipes of common tasks" type book once you have read a bit about Struts 2.0.

I really liked this book. I am already a user of Spring, Hibernate, JUnit and Velocity. For this reason I found the integration of Struts2 with these very useful. I can see where others not versed in these may find it a little difficult, but the sample uses of these technologies are pretty simple and straightforward. Therefore, new users of these technologies may have to spend some extra time in Chapter 4 to familiarize themselves with these technologies and how Struts2 works with them.

I started using Maven2 with this book and it was a very useful jumpstart into Maven2. I also use Eclipse and MyEclipse and was able to use Maven2 to create eclipse projects (mvn eclipse:eclipse) for each chapter and follow along by stepping through and changing the code in MyEclipse by running the war file (mvn package) in the built-in Tomcat web server.

Also, I am not an experienced user of Struts 1. I have working knowledge of Struts 1 having been involved in a project where I had to make some enhancements. But I didn't have a problem learning Struts2 with very little knowledge of Struts 1 using this book.

My only problem has been getting the Persistence rollback to work in the JUnit tests. Still trying to figure that out, but I have been able to work around this.

Some of the concepts and details used in the example code aren't fully discussed in the book. However, I have been able to study those by looking at the sample code.

I would recommend this book to those that are already familiar with the Spring framework, Hibernate, JSPs and J2EE. It's an excellent jumpstart into Struts2 if you're familiar using those technologies.

The book has been written by the author with a very clear intent. Complete proof of Concept and not only Struts 2.0. It is a must read for any Developer.

The samples in the book learn you very useful information about the Struts 2. You can download the sample codes. Futhermore you are immediately able to use them in your applications. Then you feel as you are at very good point to go forward into the details of the Struts 2.