Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts, Object Relational Bridge, Lucene, and Velocity [Illustrated] [Paperback]

John Carnell (Author), Jeff Linwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2003

Building web applications that are maintainable and extensible requires a significant amount of design and planning before even a single line of code can be written. However, by leveraging pre-written development frameworks, a development team can reduce the amount of time it takes to deploy an application, while at the same time promoting reuse. Traditionally, development frameworks required significant amounts of time and energy to implement. The alternative to implementing a framework was to purchase one, but this was often an expensive option that required a significant commitment to one software vendor.

Open source software has changed all of this. There are now several freely available Java development frameworks that can be used for developing web applications. These frameworks are straightforward to use, and because you have ready access to the frameworks' source code, they are also easy to customize for any organization's environment.

This book acts as a roadmap that will demonstrate how to use Jakarta development frameworks to solve everyday web application development challenges. Using our unique Problem-Design-Solution approach we will explore how the development frameworks from the Jakarta project, such as Struts, Velocity, Lucene, Cactus, and ObjectRelationalBridge can be used to develop web applications.

For each problem, the books discusses the solution's design and then how to implement it using the relevant framework. The problem domains covered include: Navigation, Screen layout, Form Validation, Business Rules, and Persistence.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Open Source development frameworks, such as Struts, finally free developers from spending a large part of their time writing 'infrastructure' code for their applications. Instead they can focus on what is important: writing applications that add value to their organizations.

This book will provide a roadmap for how to combine many of the Apache Jakarta Group's Java open source technologies together into a powerful development framework for quickly delivering real-world solutions for their organizations.

From the Author

Individuals who are looking at this book, should realize that they will not get a detailed examination of every aspect of the frameworks we are covering. To cover each of these frameworks in full detail would require several books. Instead, the author(s) goal in writing this book is to:

Introduce each of the different frameworks with enough detail so that the reader can begin working with them immediately. The reality is that most people only gain a true mastery of a technology by using it. This book was written to help a developer gain enough insight so that they "jumpstart" their use of these technologies.

Use code as our roadmap. Code is the language all developers speak. This book places a heavy emphasis on code examples. The examples are straightforward and can easily be applied to your own projects.

Share our personal experiences. Being successful with Open Source development frameworks goes beyond just the technology. The authors blended their own experiences together to provide insights in how to build a business case for using Open Source technologies within your organization. In addition, the authors explore some common mistakes developers make when using open source development frameworks for this first time.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 318 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1st edition (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861007817
• ISBN-13: 978-1861007810
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,002,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent material, poor editing, April 7, 2003

By 

Jason Read (Valencia, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts, Object Relational Bridge, Lucene, and Velocity (Paperback)

The first chapter of this book provides an amazingly well thought out conceptual presentation of 6 antipatterns (counter-productive/negative design patterns) common to web application architecture. As a web developer for the past 5 years this chapter was incredibly insightful for me. The author definitely has very extensive experience with the topic.

The remainder of the book focuses of the application of struts and other jakarta projects to successfully avoid the previously discussed antipatterns. To accomplish this the book provides a fully functional, downloadable companion application (downloaded from the wrox website). The power in this is that it provides for a very interractive teaching method... by example. This was far superior to the majority of other books I have read which provide only small non-cohesive code tidbits scattered throughout the text.

Reading this book has allowed me to go from having only a limited knowledge about jakarta, to being somewhat confident with implementing a basic web application utilizing jakarta projects including struts and applying j2ee design patterns.

You must be familiar with servlets, jsp, and tomcat (or another servlet container) prior to reading and applying this book. It is definitely not for a j2ee novice.

My only complaint about this book is the number of typos and errors in the text. I have found countless errors in the text and diagrams which have at times made understanding it difficult. Most of these are not even listed on the errata section of the book's website.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wait for the second edition, October 30, 2003

By 

Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts ObjectRelational Bridge, Lucene, and Velocity (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

This book is a reprint of a Wrox book that APress bought when Wrox went out of business. Although the book has a publication date of September 2003, it was actually published by Wrox earlier in the year. Also, APress intends on releasing a second edition of this book (ISBN:159059228X) in December 2003. With that in mind, let's discuss the contents of this book.

The book is broken up into five sections. The first and longest section discusses Struts. This section is very good as it concentrates on developing a Struts application and demonstrates good design while discussing the issues that make bad designs bad. This section ends with a look at using ObjectRelationalBridge (OJB) as a data access tier. Unfortunately the book uses an beta version of OJB (it is still not in release) that makes this section obsolete. The remaining chapters cover other open source tools available to developers including Velocity (template engine), Lucene (search engine), and Ant (build tool). Although it is interesting to see how each tool integrates into the Struts application developed earlier, the chapters are not long enough to give detailed information on any of these tools.

The conclusion is that if you are looking for a book on properly building a Struts application, you probably want to wait for the second edition. Since the OJB chapter is obsolete and the chapters on the other tools are fairly brief, this book doesn't provide anything that shouts, "Buy Me" from the shelves.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Good, the bad, the overloaded, August 13, 2003

By 

Paul G. Sundling "sundling" (Los Angeles CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts, Object Relational Bridge, Lucene, and Velocity (Paperback)

Since software moves quickly, some aspects of the book are already out of date even though it's only a matter of months old. The template tags are already deprecated in favor of the new tile tags and the Object Relational Bridge stuff has changed quite a bit (which is to be expected if you consider it wasn't even version 1 for OJB). I'm glad there's books on these topics in any case.

The first chapter is a nice read and while it's covered everywhere else, they cover MVC well and how it relates to the struts framework.

My biggest pet peeve is with one of what is otherwise their most useful chapter on prepopulating forms and setting forms up. In chapter 2 they talk about the concepts of pre and post setup actions (post as in after). Then in chapter 3 they use a PostStory example (post as in posting an ad, but then again it could be like the post form submit method). They have a PostStorySetupAction and with all the meanings of posts I had trouble not seeing it as an after[post]-before[setup] action. My brain core dumped and in the end I went back with a pen and marked out "post" everywhere in the chapter. If only they could have used AddStory or CreateStory, or I could forget the other overloaded meanings of post I wouldn't have had to reread that chapter.

The one time the book came to the rescue was when trying to mix the validator framework validation with custom validation. extending the ValidatorForm instead of ActionForm was exactly what we needed.