You've underscored one of the most compelling aspects of an MVC architecture. The inherent separation of concerns allows teams to be formed where members have differing skill sets and yet the architecture helps to define roles and responsibilities. At the most cursory level, it sounds like you're in a situation where you can have your Web designers focus on the "V" and your Java developers can focus on the "M" and the "C".
I've worked on a few different Struts-based web apps at different organizations and found in my experience that the Java developers working on these apps tend to have much further reach into (responsibility for) the presentation tier than they might like. Even on projects where there are dedicated "Web Designers" those people tend to focus on producing graphics and layout mock ups. Even in cases where these designers have been responsible for producing HTML/CSS for their designs, that markup usually has to be refined by a "Coder". In my experience, familiarity and competence with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, tag libraries, JSTL and similar technologies are pretty indispensable to a valuable Struts developer. Some may say that this is a result of us not being able to hire the right kind of Web designers to these teams - and I certainly wouldn't argue with that position. In my experience it's not an easy hiring task. If you've got a number of "Web Designers" who can produce good markup and know CSS and JavaScript, then they are obviously well suited to take responsibility for the bulk of the presentation tier. Make it a point to encourage them to learn and use JSTL. Keep in mind that it still requires a fair amount of coordination between the Web designers and the Java developers who are writing Struts Actions (to coordinate on the data that the Actions are going to expose to the presentation tier). Another big win in this kind of environment can come from recognizing patterns in your presentation tier and encapsulating more complex logic in your own tag libraries. In my experience, even Java developers who have HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills are happiest when they're focused on Java code. I've never worked on a Struts project where the Java developers wouldn't welcome to the team at least one more competent Web designer at any given moment to allow them to focus more attention on what they tend to like best. -Kelly P.S. I take issue with Leon's comment in this thread regarding Hibernate's performance. I work on an app that has very intense requirements for database IO (lots of data going in and out) and even though we've rolled our own persistence layer framework (for reasons other than performance), Hibernate is very comparable in performance benchmarks. Hibernate has many advanced features for performance tuning that most users don't understand or use. In fact, in rolling our own persistence layer, we've borrowed a lot from Hibernate and would probably be using it if we could. For the vast majority of web apps, Hibernate or a similar persistence layer framework is a huge win and shouldn't be discouraged. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
