Last week's meeting of the local WebSphere Users' Group (WUG) included a demonstration of the WebSphere Studio Site Developer (WSSD) including Struts tooling. It is quite impressive.
Through the use of wizards and other intuitive aids WSSD eases the process of developing a Struts-enabled application. It includes wizards for generating Action classes, ActionForms, mappings and the struts config file. The Web Diagram Editor (WDE -- or woody as its called) is quite impressive. It allows you to visually create form beans, actions and build mappings by drawing connectors between the various components. WSSD also has this "next generation wizard" that they call Cheatsheet. It literally walks you through the process of building a Struts-based application. I am not totally sold on the idea of graphical aids for everything but it's there for those who like it.... Sri -----Original Message----- From: Expedito Reinaldo da Silva Júnior [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 12:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Struts Tools Hi, All! I don´t know if I'm asking to the right list, but I have a question: I'd like to know what's the best IDE/tool to help construction web applications with Struts. I've seen some tools in the Struts resources page but I'm not impressed with them. In truth, I thought in a tool helping us to 'draw' pages with areas (tiles), buttons, input boxes, etc, in a way that we can access its properties and configure its name, validation rules, default values and so on. After creating our 'views', we could make the sequence of pages, like forward and redirect pages; and all visually. After all, the tool could generate my JSPs and the struts-config.xml file correctly. From the input boxes we could know what input fields the view need and generate the expected DynaBeans, with the respectives validations rules (previously setted). Following this idea, I thing we can generate our Views, FormBeans (DynaBeans) and Validations, and the ActionBean's skeleton; the user will just need to program the business rules (ActionForm.execute()). I've recently searched for drawing tools to create such 'framework' (or ide) and I find that MS Visio and System Architect has features that could produce this results. In truth, I want something like AllienFactory (http://www.alien-factory.co.uk/struts/struts-index.html), but doing much more things visually. A few days ago, I've managed some training courses and I find that the big problem about the Java Language and the technologies it involves are the IDEs we have! They are very poor (I don't know about JBuilder... I know it's very good...)!!! How can we convince VB and Delphi programmers to migrate to Java with such tools?? So, I was looking at ASP .NET and its IDE facilities (I sugest you to know and you will undertand me) and that time I thougth 'why cannot we have something like this'?? I really don't like the 'DarkSide', but its framework helps a lot its programmers. Struts is the right framework, because its MVC separation allow us to generate a tool to reach such facilities. What do you think about it????? Please help me make Java very easy besides a great language!!! I know that good Java programmers are also great experts in Design Patterns, architects and so on, but our language (Java) can really grow substancially in the world with such programmer's requisites??? Don't you think a great IDE could help? Thanks all and sorry my bad english. Expedito Jr. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
