Thanks for the input; all of it is right on track of what others have been mentioning. I plan to tackle many of the more finer-grained issues like request versus session storage, when to forward versus redirect, wizards, etc... I'm going to try to wrap them into real-world, albeit small, examples. As with any book, the problem boils down to space and time. I'm sure that Ted and the other Author doing the Struts book for Wiley are going through the same issues right now.
In the end, I won't be able to cover every single topic that involes Struts or web development. It's just not possible to do so. What I have to do is to hit all of the major topics and as many of the smaller ones that I can. OReilly books tend to be more for the intermediate or advanced, rather than the absolute beginner. That's tough because it always leaves a group out, but as someone mentioned to me earlier, you have to cut the line somewhere. Tiles will definitely be a topic and topics like the Struts Console from James Holmes deserve some coverage. The IDE topic is an interesting one and definitely worthy, but it's a question of how do I cover all of the possible IDE's that people use. For example, here at my company, people create, edit, and debug Struts with everything from JBuilder5, SlickEdit, TextPad, vi, and several more. These guys are all good and have excellent debugging skills. I believe that it's true that using an IDE and stepping through code will save debugging time. However, we also don't force a standard IDE down someone's throat as long as they can code and debug fast with good quality. So that one scares me a little. I might be able to select a few IDE's, but someone will always get left out. The good news is that I'm still flushing out about half of the chapters and sections, so nothing is out at this point. Chuck -----Original Message----- From: Sandeep Takhar [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 9:49 AM To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: RE: OReilly Struts book this looks quite impressive. Some thoughts... The examples that you give should be more than just a banking application I think. I believe you should have some value-add in the book. For example -- when to use session storage vs request storage. I know there are new featues such as forwarding actionforms (I think there is something mentioned about this.) It would be nice to know a practical example of using this. I like what you are doing with security and exceptions. two other people mentioned having something about tiles and something about using ide's. This has my vote as well. I think that you should have as many references to other complimentary books. Is the EJB section as complete as it can be? How about team based development. Setting up sandboxes, issues with config files. Are you using tomcat for examples? How about some configuration issues with other containers. I am thinking of weblogic... Which tools to use for developing with custom tags (I have hear of ultradev and it's add-ons is good). Other tools -- There have been numerous mentioned in this list -- there was one today about tables and another about struts code generators etc. I also think you should keep in close contact with who the developers are -- I bet they have some great ideas on what to document -- what to expect etc. just some thoughts Sandeep
