The Barnes & Noble Review
Nowadays, it seems like every Java developer’s using JSPs -- and every JSP developer is interested in frameworks, the fastest way to deliver the best JSP software. The “king” of JSP frameworks is Struts, from the Apache Jakarta project. And we’ve seen no better resource for learning Struts than Struts Kick Start.
James Turner and Kevin Bedell begin with an exceptionally lucid high-level overview of Struts’ goals, elements, and the MVC design pattern that underlies it. Then, via an extremely simple application, they introduce each essential Struts function and explain how Struts interacts with JSP code, servlets, and the new JSTL tag libraries.
With a simple application under your belt, Turner and Bedell move on to a more sophisticated financial application, starting with a functional requirements spec. This five-chapter case study covers everything from wireframing and use cases to modeling. There’s also a full chapter on the crucial struts-config.xml file, which ties together all the elements of a Struts application.
In the following section, the authors take you under the hood with one sample Struts tag and then introduce each Struts tag library, with sample code. That includes up-to-the-moment coverage of Tiles, Validator, and other new Struts 1.1 enhancements. The authors close with best practices for integrating Struts with both Enterprise JavaBeans and web services, as well as testing and deployment with Jakarta Ant and Cactus. All the book’s code is on CD-ROM, along with the latest versions of everything from Tomcat to JBoss. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.
Posted by blackbear at January 26, 2003 03:56 AMHi,
I was interested in the powerpoint to help sell to manager-types. I couldn't find the free template on the web???
Is there a link?
Thanks, in advance,
Mike Siddall
Posted by: Mike Siddall on February 11, 2003 09:20 AMAthough I am thoroughly enjoying this book, I must object to one inconsistency that I see in the source code examples.
Nothing frustrates me more than picking up a book written in the year 2003 and seeing html written as HTML 4.0. I would have hoped that the careful attention to detail which the authors gave to the design of the software would have carried over into the html source as well. In the case of examples in this book, it clearly did not.
Many people have dedicated their lives to doing the song and dance necessary to make people realize how bad it is to continue to write HTML 4.0 when doing web applications. Not only does it thumb its nose at the extremely hard work the W3C has done to define a standards base, it also rekindles the bad habits of developers which is holding back the algorithms of web browsers to support this invalid html source.
The examples in this book show no use of DTDs, stylesheets or valid xhtml syntax. It is as if the java web development community didn't get the memo on xhtml when the rest of us did.
That being said, I still believe the content in this book is very well laid out and at the end of the day, the html source is really a small part of the whole document. However, the men who authored this book will write other books and I ask, please consider proving to the community that your careful attention to detail which exists in the design of the java code can be carried into the html source the next time you go to type up an example.
Posted by: Dan Allen on February 21, 2003 01:55 PM