Lawrie Gallardo wrote:
I'm relatively new to Struts and I have to say that I've found it to have a realtively steep learning curve. And the only reason for this is that there are so many different ways to do things and no definitive best ways of achieving anything.
I totally agree. I have just transitioned to the web tier from a career slaving away at the back-end of large Java server systems for telecomms and finance. I was looking forward to using Struts quite a bit, suspecting, perhaps wrongly, that the nature of web tier work would mean a fast evolution of high-quality tools. Maybe I've been spoilt by a life dominated by strict (read: paranoid) coding practices, Ant and JUnit, but Struts is rather a confusing mess once past the initial "Oh, cool, a working action and page!" phase. And this is coming from someone who has just fled EJB land...
For example, I've got a couple of Really Common Requirements - logon and a side nav bar / tree view. I've been amazed that I've not found a simple, standard example for either of these. Instead, I've tripped over a wealth of little fiddly details that derailed my progress. Nothing like lots of soft XML config to really trip you up with details I find... "I've never even heard of that option, and when I tried to use it I wasted 5 hours not noticing a typo in one of the repeated strings!"
I'd much rather there was a bit of focus to the framework than the mass of competing options. "Make the simple things simple and the hard things possible" and all that...
Totally agree. For example, I did some work with Struts Layout:Treeview for my nav bar prototype. I very much appreciate volunteer effort, and don't wish to knock anyone's efforts, but I have to say that for a standard solution advocated by a couple of books it's fairly poor... There were a couple of immediate show-stoppers with working with the Treeview which was very disappointing. (Turns out the license precludes commercial use anyway.) The point of this isn't to knock Layout (again, I appreciate effort and feel guilty that I don't pay back into the commnunity that makes me fine tools), but rather to illustrate how something fairly standard - a treeview nav bar with a load of actions/forwards - is surprisingly difficult for a beginner with the toolkit to knock up cleanly.
I guess some of this cognitive whiplash comes from the fact that several of the core components are Very Cool. The core idea of the actions is just Very Sensible, the basic idea of using ResourceBundle keys everywhere Just Works, etc. I particularly like Validator, although I can see, as this thread is discussing, room for disagreement about alternative implementations. Custom rules are very nice, and very easily added. I'm just troubled by the fact that most of the elements I find straightforward and cleanly finished are those which my boss just doesn't see! The basic project elements he wants in a couple of days - that tree view in a readable/maintainable form, a nice simple PAM login & timeout mechanism* - turn into real timesinks. (Actually, to be fair, the move from 1.0 -> 1.1 and similar shifts in several libaries also led to confusion when working from Googled, and often conflicting, advice.)
This is a rather rude rant I know, and I appreciate people are scratching their own itches, but it would be nice to seem some concerted effort to solve some of the FAQs cleanly, and to generate more of a core catalogue of Patterns for noobs like myself. (Kudos to people like Ted Husted who do maintain some useful resources.) In that vein, I'm very much looking forwards to the new Struts Cookbook that O'Reilly have just put out, was rather hoping to see it in the post this morning. Might well answer lots of questions for me.
I'm not sure I should hit 'Send' on this for fear of offending people, please just see this as constructive initial impression feedback. I see a lot of promise in the Struts toolkit, better be, sort of bet the project on it now!, and would love to see more consensus emerging about Best Practices.
--
David Kennedy
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
