Mastering Jakarta Struts

by James Goodwill

Jakarta Struts Project provides an open source framework for creating Web applications that leverage both the Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages technologies. Struts has received developer support and is quickly becoming a dominant actor in the open source community. James Goodwill is a well-respected authority and bestselling author of books on Java Web applications Provides a hands-on, code-intensive tutorial on building Java Web applications using...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471213020
• ISBN13: 9780471213024
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good solid Struts Tutorial

I feel this is the best book for novice Struts developers eventhough it is not as up to date as some of the others. This book does a good coverage of extending Struts, and a really good coverage of the inner workings of Struts. I have all of the Struts books (Sams, KF, Orielly, Manning, and Wiley) etc. This is the first book out of the lot that I could just read (cover to cover). It has good flow, and it is easy to understand. (I read it quite a while back when it first came out).Areas of weakness is in Tiles framework support and the Validator framework, but currently no Struts book covers Tiles well. Struts in Action does a really good coverage of the Validator book as does the Orielly book.First get this book as a good tutorial.Second get the Struts in Action book as a good reference.Then get the Orielly Struts book (in this order in my opinion). If you are doing Struts, it can't hurt to have Sue Speilmans book (who covers nested tags well), and the Sams Struts book.I have all of the books. This is the best tutorial for getting started.

Great Coverage of 1.1

This is a great text on an often poorly documented topic. It does not cover a couple of the 1.1 topics, but it does an excellent job of describing everything that I needed. It was also written extremely well, which is more than I can say for some of the other texts. I am very satisfied with my purchase.

Nice Struts 1.1 book

Mastering Struts is clearly written, detailed and full of pragmatic development and deployment advice. I'm surprised at the reviewers who say this book doesn't cover much (or any) 1.1 information. The 1.1 coverage I found very useful includes ActionForm, ActionServlet, ActionsMappings, plugins, RequestProcessor, new 1.1 tags, etc etc.Other material in this book was far deeper than the Struts docs, including:* The value of MVC, and when and why to use Struts (amazingly, the Struts docs are very light on these crucial adoption issues)* I18N. The docs have a couple paragraphs, and this book has a whole chapter--really helped me internationalize my apps in a meaningful way.* Debugging and error handling* The tag references add a lot of info not in the docs and give code examples* Tons of database and JDBC info with MySQL examples. Again, amazing that the docs don't cover much on hooking into databases since 99% of serious webapps connect to one.* Also there are two, full apps that the author develops in this book that go a long way to showing how a Struts app can/should be built and deployed.I don't know if I'll buy any of the other books when they come out (I might) but they have a lot to live up to.

great Struts book

I liked this book and learned a lot from it. It is now the top book on the stack of books on my desk. One of the things I like isthat this book is a great reference. I consult it frequently for explanations of Struts tags, especially because the author includedcode samples that show how each tag is used in combination with other tags. I use the bean, logic, and template tag libraryreferences pretty regularly.The error handling info is great. The info on validating data in your forms is good. The deployment advice is excellent. I alsoreally like the debugging chapter and found it incredibly useful since Struts isn't the absolute most stable framework I've everused. One reviewer said he didn't like the embedded Tomcat example in the debugging chapter, but I learned a lot fromdebugging a real app and can apply the concepts pretty easily to my own work.I read through the internationalization section of this book and am now pretty hyped about putting that functionality in some ofmy Struts apps, even if my company doesn't really think its necesary yet. :| I also like that this book shows you how to build a complete Struts applications. You can see clearly how Struts works withservlets, jsp, and other serverside technologies. I even learned a few things from the summary of servlets and jsp in the secondchapter.All around a very useful book!

Now I understand

I'm a dedicated open source developer and always will be but I have to admit I've spent many days and nights trying to decipher the Struts docs. Not only how to use plugins, datasources, and other elements of the framework, but why and when to use them. The docs are often confusing at best. This book made sense of Struts for me. It is very clear and just as good, it is concise. The code snippets make great examples, and the full-on sample employee database app really demonstrates how Struts, servlets, JSP, and tab libraries can be used in conjunction to build serious apps.The book begins with a quick review of servlets and JSP, which was really useful given that Struts implementation of MVC is a little bit different. The servlet life cycle and Struts MVC implementation illustrations are excellent references. The debugging and error management chapters were also extremely helpful. All in all a great book that has enabled me to move beyond tinkering and begin doing some serious development.