Apache Jakarta Struts (Action 1)

For the past two weeks I have actually been looking at a lot of Struts, but i’m still not well-versed enough to document it down, also because of the amount of information needed to document it. Seems like it’ll take a few pages.

Briefly going through it, Struts is a web application framework that enforces the MVC model. The sequence generally goes like this:

1. The user makes a HTTP request through the web (e.g. Employee.do?method=retrieve&empId=23)
2. The web server receives the request. By servlet mapping in web.xml, *.do requests are handled by the struts ActionServlet. The HTTP request is passed to the ActionServlet, which works as a controller dispatcher.
3. The ActionServlet receives the request, and checks the name of the .do (Employee). It looks up the action mapping configured in struts-config.xml (or a corresponding module config file). Information regarding the action’s form bean, Action class, validation, mapping forwards are retrieved.
4. The form bean declares the request parameters as Java data types, allowing automatic mapping to be performed, instead of retrieving all parameters as Strings.
5. If validation is required, validation is performed based on the form bean types, and any validation.xml as configured in the Validator plug-in. The configuration file allows basic checking such as required fields, less-than/more-than, regex, as well as custom validation providers. If validation fails, the request is immediately forwarded to the validation failure page.
6. Once validation passes, the Form Bean class is created and populated with the corresponding values in the request. The Action class is then called to perform business logic, using the information in the form bean class. The Action then redirects to the appropriate mapping forwards as defined in the action configuration.
7. Control returns to the ActionServlet, which looks up the actual URL of the mapping forward in the config file. All these lookups allow complete separation of URLs between the view and model.
8. The actual URL content is served to the client.

The framework is highly configurable, such as splitting the configuration into modules, using dynamic forms without creating actual form beans, tag libraries that easily display and retain information in form beans, etc.

Apart from Action 1, Struts also evolved into Action 2 and Shale Frameworks, which I’m unsure of the differences.