19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good tutorial and reference - Example Code Needs Improvement, June 11, 2008
This review is from: Struts 2 in Action (Paperback)
I had to learn Struts2 quickly since I recently changed jobs and my new team has several web application projects built using Struts2.
Overall, I thought the book was done very well if you are looking for a good introduction to Struts2. The first 8 chapters are very good.
The main negative is the source code for the book's examples. The authors provide one very large war file with all the source code embedded into the war file along with an overall web application divided into sub-applications for each chapter.
This packaging of the source code into the war file made it difficult for me to create individual projects in my development IDE that demonstrated just the material in a specific chapter. I had to spend quite a bit of time breaking down the source code into individual web projects and then figuring out on my own what jars needed to go into each project, what the struts.xml file needed to have, and what ever else was necessary to separate out just that chapter's sub-application so I could run that example and play with it.
Where this really became a problem was in chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9 is a very advanced introduction to integrating Spring and Hibernate/JPA into Struts2. I never could get this chapter's example to work correctly.
However, chapter 10 on the validation framework then uses the same code as chapter 9, so you really cannot separate out the code for either chapter 9 and 10.
The validation framework is likely something even beginning Struts2 developers will want to use, while Spring/JPA/Hibernate is for more advanced developers and should have been well after the chapter on how to use the validation framework.
Also, the authors really don't give you a good understanding of what Struts2 jars you need to have to build a basic Struts2 application. There is some information about this in chapter 13 (setting up your IDE) but this information should really be at the beginning of the book. Also I don't think the list the authors provide is accurate since my basic HelloWorld (get the user to enter a name, call an Action class, and then display Hello userName in new jsp) worked with far fewer jars. Note there is apparently a new example war that just is a basic Hello World so there may be some information in that war file. That war was not on the manning web site when I purchased the book.
This book is good but be prepared to struggle working with the code examples if you want to work on the examples in your own development environment.
I recommend the authors create separate complete war files for each chapter's example to make it easier for users to just get that chapter's example code into their development IDE.
Lastly, the book does get 4 stars because the author's explanations of the basics of Struts2 (chapters 1-8) is very easy to follow for experienced Java developers. I'm now ready to tackle the Struts2 applications in my new job.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great starter book for Struts 2, May 16, 2008
This review is from: Struts 2 in Action (Paperback)
I took a chance and pre-ordered this book because I have recently started a Struts2 project and wanted to learn more about the framework. The book did not disappoint.
The authors explained the concepts behind the framework clearly and used examples that were immediately useful. The book is a little too short and in many cases a few more details would have been appreciated but it seemed to be a deliberate decision to leave out some of the less common use cases to avoid cluttering up the book. Thus, this book is ideal if you are new to Struts 2 but have some prior experience with Java web development.
I like the fact that an entire chapter was dedicated to integrating Spring and Hibernate into the framework. It brings all the bits and pieces from the online documentation together in a cohesive and comprehensive package.
Chapters were also dedicated to validation, internationalization, best practices and migration from Struts classic. The authors spent several chapters on how the Value Stack and the ActionContext worked and how OGNL fits into this framework.
All in all there is enough information in this book to start and to produce a complete Struts 2 application.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ponderous read, June 11, 2010
This review is from: Struts 2 in Action (Paperback)
First, this book is outdated already. It covers Struts 2.0, and if you use 2.1 (which you should) you will have problems. This is particularly acute because 2.1 uses a lot of newer convention-based mapping to actions, and a lot of the techniques described in the book are now deprecated.
However, this biggest problem with the book is that it's a ponderous read. The author spends countless pages discussing the minutiae of OGNL and type converters ... way more than a beginner needs to know. However, more critical topics like the Struts2 JSP tags are barely covered until Chapter 6. Other important topics like session management are barely covered at all. This book needs a lot of editing and reorganization before it will be useful for most beginners.
Nevertheless, there is some useful information here for those with the patience to dig for it. I thought the discussion of interceptors was very solid. However, much of this doesn't justify the price of the book. I recommend just downloading the Starting Struts 2 docs from the Apache Struts2 website, and working through it. You'll learn a lot quicker through their "bootstrap" tutorial than you will here.
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