I agree with Devon's concerns about this. Struts assumes a pretty robust
understanding of the general principles of servlet and JSP programming
(including the intricacies of a web application archive file).
The good news for developers is that all of this level of knowledge is
transferrable, because the underlying specs are used by *any* servlet and
JSP environment, and the various app servers and servlet containers
implement them (pretty much, and getting better :-) the same way. But you
are going to be an unhappy camper if you don't know what <load-on-startup>
does, or that you have to make session attributes thread safe, or how the
/WEB-INF directory is organized, or ...).
Craig
On Mon, 6 Aug 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > 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
>
>
