Struts 2 in review

Much of what I learned of Struts 2 is based on the book Struts 2 in Action.  The book was well written, well organized, and pretty easy to read over the weekend despite being just shy of 400 pages.  I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the Manning books.  I have one other Manning book that I'm reading, Spring in Action, for my analysis of Spring MVC and it's also of very high quality.

Anyway, after reading the book, I experimented with building a few apps where I could demo the framework's features.  As we will see, some of them make customization easier, some of them help separate model and view concerns, and yet others left me scratching my head why they chose to go that direction.

Where we're going & where we've been...

I've finished reading Struts 2 in Action. Quite a good book, but before I start talking about it I want to play around with some Struts 2 code and get an app running. In the mean time, I've been thinking about posting some goals and criteria for myself so I have something to evaluate and not just looking for what I may subjectively think is "cool" (though I'll probably do that too).

But before I even go that far, some back-story to this whole web framework scenario may be necessary. In order to understand where we are going, sometimes it helps to understand how we've got here and why. So what follows is a bit of history. If you're a Java web developer who is well versed with the current situation, then most of this will probably be a dejavu for you.

Web Application Frameworks

Web Application Frameworks have become a recent obsession of mine. For the last seven or so years the framework I have most heavily utilized has been Apache Struts. Frameworks are generally supposed to ease your development and, at the same time, be a pleasure to work with. Lofty goals to be sure. And while Struts' MVC architecture was a revolutionary step in the right direction, it had more than it's share of shortcomings. So what is life after Struts like for a Java web developer?

Thankfully, there have been many products released (in various states of completion) that have attempted to reconcile Struts' shortcomings or perhaps revolutionize web development all over again. In the next few articles I'll attempt to review some of these frameworks by both reading about them (and I mean full book reads, not an hour in front of Google) and experimenting with building an app. Hopefully something better than Hello World.

Now this brings me to my other motivation for doing so. It seems to be a rite of initiation for Java web developers to build their own framework at some point or another. My own pet project is one that I call Phorce. However, mine is not in Java. It's in PHP. Feel free to check out the source if you're so inclined, but keep in mind it's a work in progress and will likely remain that way until I can at least gauge what the best direction is to take in this web framework arena.

Hello World

Ok, so I've finally done it. I have my own blog. It really is about time.

I'm dedicating this to my technical thoughts, musings, and sometimes ramblings. The title, STOSB, is a reference to the 8086 assembly instruction used for storing a byte from a CPU register to the location in memory referenced by es:di. It was intended for use in string processing and means "Store String Byte".

Anyway, not much of substance to say in this post. It was just intended as a cheesy introduction. Hello world. :)