Struts Design and Programming: A Tutorial (A Tutorial series) (Paperback)

~ Budi Kurniawan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Struts is the most popular framework for building scalable Java Web applications. The first part of this book explains the latest version of Struts and teaches how to build real-world Struts applications. The second part goes the extra mile to discuss how to design Struts applications and solve common problems in Struts development. It's like two books at the price of one.

More importantly, this book is a tutorial designed to make the reader truly understand the concepts. It explains not only how to use Struts' features, but also how a certain feature works under the hood and which to choose if similar features exist. Examples are relevant and based on real-world applications. Several important topics rarely mentioned in other books—such as file upload, paging, object caching—are given detailed treatment.

The first part is for beginners and Struts developers who don't feel they have a complete grasp of Struts. It explains the following and many more:

- The Model-View-Controller design pattern - Action forms - User input validation - The Validator Plug-in - JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) - The JSP 2.0 Expression Language (EL) - HTML, Bean, Logic, Nested Tag Libraries - Application configuration - The Custom SelectLabel Tag - Tiles - Message handling and internationalization - Struts-JSF Plug-in - The open source DisplayTag Library - File upload and programmable file download - Jakarta Commons BeanUtil Class

In addition, this book deals with many design topics such as - Data persistence - Transfer objects - Configuration information sharing - Object caching - Application security - Paging and sorting - HttpServletRequest wrapping - Early session invalidation

The last chapter, "How Struts Works", dissects Struts' source code and explains the components that together make Struts tick. This chapter is particularly interesting to readers who want to know how Struts works in the background and how to extend Struts. Understanding it helps you design and develop more effective Struts applications.

This book is for you if you need one written with clarity and readability in mind.

From the Publisher

This book is for you if you need one written with clarity and readability in mind.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 450 pages
• Publisher: BrainySoftware.com (April 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0975212818
• ISBN-13: 978-0975212813
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #743,571 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Design Part is great, October 7, 2005

By	Xiao Hoa (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Part 1 of this book discusses Struts programming. It covers the current version of Struts (1.2). The second part is what's really great. It teaches you how to design Struts application properly. Some related design patterns are discussed that made you glad you'd chosen this book. For example, there are a number of chapters that are as useful and high quality as this article (from the same author)

http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/05/decorators.html

Other design topics include
- Paging
- Managing very large resultsets in multi pages
- Transfer data object design pattern
- Data Access Object
- Caching
- Persistence layer
- etc

There is also a chapter entitled "How Struts Works" that provides a useful insight into the internal working of Struts. I found this one really exciting.

I would also like to point out that the author has a clear and easy to understand writing style. Examples work well and relevant.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best book around to LEARN Struts, November 15, 2005

By	Riccardo Audano (Chiavari, Italy) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This is a very clear, concise introduction to the Struts framework.
It' s up to date, and present the subject with a learn-by-example strategy. I appreciated the fact that the various aspects of Struts are presented with many little independend manageable examples intead of the typical "example application" that many book use to "put it all together". Overall an excellent text to understand the whys and hows of Struts. Be warned you will not find material on the more sophisticated aspects and usages of Struts, but a good foundation upon which you can build with working experience and more advanced books like "Struts Recipes". Anyhow you can just make up your mind by going to jtutedotcom and checking the entire book online!

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong in concepts, August 25, 2005

By	Chuck (Wichita) - See all my reviews

The good thing about this book is it teaches you concepts, rather than technicality (which you can browse from Struts' website). It starts with the crucial paradigm that every Struts developer has to fully understand: the Model-View-Controller pattern (aka the Model 2 architecture). Chapter 1 provides you a very good example on MVC, presenting one achieved with servlets/JSP and one with Struts. Once you're comfortable with it, Chapters 2, 3, 4 explain about actions, action forms, and how to configure your Struts application.

Subsequent chapters talk about the Validation framework, an important feature that makes Struts the most popular MVC framework. With Validation, you can validate user input both on the server-side as well as the client side, or both. No need to write Javascript functions as they are generated automatically. This is really a cool feature. The discussion of Validation in this book is more detailed than in other books.

This book also covers Tiles very well. You use Tiles to help you lay out the components in your Web pages. Tiles is dynamic and make it easy to achieve consistent look for your application. Changing the look involves only editing a single file. Again, I feel I have a good grasp of Tiles after reading this book (I've previously read a similar chapter in Manning's Struts in Action book)

After you understand how to program with Struts, the second part of the book talks about design. There are a number of important J2EE design pattern discussed, all of them in plain language.

If you've never learned Struts before, this book is definitely for you. If you've been using Struts, you might still be interested in the design topics which is quite advanced to even seasoned Struts developers.