Some recent and upcoming appearances

On March 19th, James was interviewed by Sys-Con radio at the WebEdge conference in Boston. You can hear the interview here

On May 8th at 6PM, Kevin and James will be presenting a talk on Struts at the New England Java Users Group, more information is available here

Barnes & Nobles Weighs in on Struts Kick Start

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.

A Reader Comments

After much anticipation, the book is now available, both from SAMS (with $8 overnight shipping!!), and Amazon.  Readers are already beginning to comment:

From: Ron Day [mailto:ronday@ronday.cc]
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2002 10:55 AM
To: Struts Users Mailing List
Subject: RE: [ANNOUNCE] Shameless Plug: Struts Kick Start now  available for shipping at Amazon