> If you wanted to slim this down, and your goal is just to
> bring them up to speed on Struts, I'd hazard to say that
> there's much that a Struts developer doesn't ~really~ need
> to know about Web application development.
Not sure I agree with this. My experience with Struts indicates
that it is still not robust enough for this kind of thinking.
I believe that a developer that doesn't have a reasonably deep
understanding will become very frustrated very quickly. I can't
tell you the number of times that I've had to dive into the
source code to answer my questions. When errors occur, a stack
trace is often all the help you get and that requires you to
know the software structure intimately. Then there's the lack
of solid documentation. One can't even buy a book about Struts
yet to help answer questions. And the fact that the people I
am teaching aren't native English speakers doesn't help either.
They would find the volume on this list quite intimidating.
I guess I would agree with you if there were one person in the
group that knew Struts thoroughly and could help the others
when problems arose. At the moment, that would be me. But I am
only contracted here till the end of the year. After that,
these guys need to be able to go it alone. And I think Struts
still expects too much expertise and effort from the developer
to be considered a tool for the average programmer. So my
philosophy is to try to push them to be a bit beyond average.
In any case, thanks for your comments. I will update my outline.
Devon
