1. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community The Struts Framework Community Craig McClanahan

2. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Agenda  Welcome  Struts 1.1 – New Features  What Does The Future Hold?  Questions and Answers

3. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Welcome  The "Struts Community" is growing...  Users (STRUTS-USER mailing list has 1750 subscribers)  Downloads (1000/day first two weeks of March)  Plug-in and Add-on technologies  Publications and books  Awareness (try a Google search on "struts")  The future looks even brighter

4. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Struts 1.1 – New Features  Jakarta Commons Libraries  DynaActionForm  Declarative Exception Handling  Nested Tag Library  PlugIn API  Multiple Application Support

5. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Jakarta Commons Libraries  COMMONS-BEANUTILS  Pluggable type converters  Mapped properties  contact.phone(Work)  DynaBeans  Transparently supported by BeanUtils and PropertyUtils

6. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Commons-Beanutils -- DynaBeans public interface DynaBean { public Object get(String name); public Object get(String name, int index); public Object get(String name, String key); public void set(String name, Object value); public void set(String name, int index, Object value); public void set(String name, String key, Object value); }

7. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Jakarta Commons Libraries  COMMONS-LOGGING  Wrapper around any logging API  Intelligent discovery mechanism  Did I ask for a particular factory? Use it  Is Log4J available? Use it  Is JDK1.4 logging available? Use it  Default to "no-op" logger  Simple System.err logging implementation available  Relies on underlying logging implementation for configuration

8. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Jakarta Commons Libraries  COMMONS-DBCP and COMMONS-POOL  Provide javax.sql.DataSource implementation  Connection timeouts  Both getConnection() methods supported  Idle connections can be released  For backwards compatibility, org.apache.struts.util.GenericDataSource is a wrapper around this  Bridges the JDBC API changes in JDK 1.4

9. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 DynaActionForm – 1  A common user complaint: writing ActionForm beans is a pain  Now, in many cases you will not have to!  Only necessary to provide non-default reset() and/or validate() methods  Configure the properties and their types in your struts-config.xml file  Transparently supported by all of the existing Struts machinery

10. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 DynaActionForm – 2 <form-bean name="logonForm" type="org.apache.struts.action.DynaActionForm"> <form-property name="username" type="java.lang.String"/> <form-property name="password" type="java.lang.String"/>

11. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Declarative Exception Handling – 1  Previously, an Action had to deal with all business logic exceptions itself  Now, you can choose to delegate exception handling to other application resources  Global and per-Action mapping declared in struts-config.xml (like forwards):  From a particular Exception class or superclass  To an application-relative path  Requires a small change to your Action to leverage this feature...

12. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Declarative Exception Handling – 2 public ActionForward execute (ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {... throw new PasswordExpiredException(...);... }

13. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Declarative Exception Handling – 3... <exception key="expired.password" type="o.a.s.w.e.ExpiredPasswordException" path="/changePassword.jsp"/>...

14. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 The "Nested" Tag Library – 1  If you ever programmed in Pascal, you might remember the "with" statement...  Nested tags allow you to establish a default bean for nested property references  1:1 correspondence, and identical functionality, of other Struts tags  Except the "name" property gets set for you automatically...

15. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 The "Nested" Tag Library – 2  Before using the nested tags:  After using the nested tags:

16. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Plug-In API  Before, you had to subclass ActionServlet (or define a separate servlet) to initialize application resources at startup time  Now, you can declare a PlugIn that receives notification of application startup and shutdown public interface PlugIn { public void destroy(); public void init(ActionServlet servlet, ApplicationConfig config) throws ServletException; }

17. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Multiple Application Support – 1  Very popular user request for large scale applications  Design goals:  Support multiple independent struts-config.xml files in the same webapp  Sub-applications are identified by an "application prefix" that follows the context path  Existing Struts-based applications should be able to be installed individually, or as a sub- application, with no changes to the pages, Actions, form beans, or other code

18. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Multiple Application Support – 2  Implications of the design goals:  "Default" sub-application with a zero-length prefix (like the ROOT context in Tomcat)  "Context-relative" paths must now be treated as "sub-application-relative"  ActionServlet initialization parameters migrate to the struts-config.xml file  Controller must identify the relevant sub- application, and make its resources available (as request attributes)  APIs must be reviewed for assumptions about there being (for example) only one set of ActionMappings

19. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Multiple Application Support – 3  The goals appear to have been achieved:  Please download the beta and help us by testing your apps as sub-applications  Current restrictions:  All requests must flow through the controller – no direct hyperlinks to JSP pages with Struts tags  Can be lifted by implementing the controller as a Filter in Servlet 2.3  Works only for extension-mapped paths to the controller servlet (*.do)

20. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Current Status  Struts 1.1-beta-1 released on March 19, 2002  After the download counts referenced earlier...  http://jakarta.apace.org/struts/  Please try it out with your own applications, and report any compatibility (or other) bugs:  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/  I anticipate at least one more beta, but there might well be more  It will be released when we're satisfied that it works correctly

21. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 What Does The Future Hold?  In the mean time, the Java world around web applications is changing...  Servlet 2.4 (JSR-154)  JSP 1.3 (JSR-152)  JSP Standard Tag Library 1.0 (JSR-52)  JavaServer Faces (JSR-127)  And new things are becoming popular...  Web services  Portals

22. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Servlet 2.4  Some nice additions  Request lifecycle events  Request dispatcher events  But not likely to affect Struts in the near term  However, is it time to migrate Struts to be based on Servlet 2.3 (and JSP 1.2)?  Filters and lifecycle listeners  Request and response wrappers  JSP Standard Tag Library...

23. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 JSP 1.3  Expression Language  Available now in JSP Standard Tags Library  In JSP 1.3, can use in all tag attributes, as well as in template text  We can help the transition by supporting this in Struts tags  JSP Fragments  Create parameterized "custom actions"

24. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 JSP Standard Tag Library  Currently in beta, will be final in June  RI implemented at Jakarta  http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/  Core library has familiar functionality  URL, XML, and I18N tags also very useful  Expression language allows for much simpler tags  JSP containers can optimize performance  Struts users should definitely plan on utilizing these tag libraries

25. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 JavaServer Faces – 1  The most popular question at JavaOne this year:  What's the deal with Struts and JavaServer Faces?  The short version of the answer:  JavaServer Faces will be a useful mechanism to build the UI for Struts-based web applications  For the longer version of the answer, let's go back into history for a moment...

26. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 JavaServer Faces – 2  Where did Struts come from?  Two years of discussion about MVC and Model 1 versus Model 2  My experience building a large scale web application that was fully internationalized  The key feature – separation of concerns  The key technologies enforcing separation  Logical name mappings in struts-config.xml  View --> Controller encapsulated in a form submit, matched to a form bean  Controller --> View via RequestDispatcer

27. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 JavaServer Faces – 3  Where is JavaServer Faces coming from?  The need to provide rich UI components to page developers  The need for a standard set of components to ease learning (and enable tools support)  But UI components are not enough by themselves:  Event handling  Validation  Navigation  There needs to be enough there to be usable out of the box

28. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 JavaServer Faces – 4  So what do we do about the overlap?  Use the parts that are helpful, ignore the parts that are not  The ideal scenario:  Struts provides a JSF-compliant tag library that provides the functionality we know and love  Context-relative paths, URL rewriting,...  Struts applications can migrate their UI to use Faces, one page at a time, with no changes to the Actions, form beans, or business logic  This is an entirely feasible endgame  We're just not done yet...

29. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community1 Questions and Answers  Phew, that's a lot of information...  So, what's on your minds?

30. BOF #1820 -- The Struts Framework Community