Learning by doing: longer

[Vincent Stoessel <vi...@xaymaca.com>]

I think I will go for "JSP Site Design", thanks for that.

OK, it's time for me to get real basic here.

I want to make the ulimate "Hello MVC Struts" app from scratch as a 
learning exercise and for a tutorial that I will freely post and give away.




Platform: tomcat 4.01 , struts 1.1 with included tiles.
Dev tools:  forte for java 4.0 CE and emacs when I get tired of the GUIs.


Goal:to make a mvc struts app so basic that a beginner can understand 
the basic structure of the framework. all it has to do is display
"You are learning well" on a web page if you login sucessfully
or take users to an error page if login is not sucessfull.
For simplicity, the username and passwd can be stored in a local file.



The old jsp designer in me would plan out a series of web pages
that would execute JSP applications in a linear fashion or all on
one page (yes, the dreaded embedded scriptlet code in one jsp page).
I now know that the logic needs to be separated into a bean(taglib?)

I've seen all the model 2 diagrams and understand how it all works in 
theory. But from a partical struts point of view I'm baffled by the
naming conventions (everything is named Action*). Is my business
logic supposed to be contained in a class, bean or taglib?
I am new to taglib thing and I am looking for a good
boook, online tutorial on that as well.

So what is the first step, creating a struts-config file, writing the 
business logic class/bean/taglib or drawing a pretty visio diagram?

Thanks in advance.

















Dave Hodson wrote:
> Get a copy of either "JSP Site Design" or "JSP Web Development"
> They have pretty good examples...
> 
> (JSP Site Design has a much more in-depth look at Struts than does "JSP Web Development", which is more of a beginner's guide to JSP)
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> Dave Hodson 
> MessageCast, inc.
> Email: dave@messagecast.net <ma...@messagecast.net> 
> www.messagecast.net
> 
> 
> 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Vincent Stoessel [mailto:vincent@xaymaca.com]
>>Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 2:50 PM
>>To: Struts Users
>>Subject: learning by doing: newbie alert
>>
>>
>>Hello,
>>I have been doing a lot of reading lately about struts
>>and have tried modifying examples and such. I have really 
>>been trying to
>>just mess with things till I get a feel as to how all this works.
>>This thing has a lot of moving parts. :)
>>
>>I am getting frustrated but I know that is a normal part
>>of learning something new, so I trudge on.
>>
>>I'm still trying to understand how to start adding
>>my own functionality to the default struts webapps.
>>For example my goal right now is to create a simple
>>login screen that authenticates off a jdbc data source.
>>Do I have to write a taglib in order to do this?
>>Maybe we need a struts-stripped-down-basic-example.war ?
>>Thanks
>>
>>
>>-- 
>>Vincent Stoessel
>>Linux Systems Developer
>>vincent xaymaca.com
>>
>>
>>--
>>To unsubscribe, e-mail:   
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-- 
Vincent Stoessel
Linux Systems Developer
vincent xaymaca.com


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Re: Learning by doing: longer

[Joe Germuska <Jo...@Germuska.com>]

>So what is the first step, creating a struts-config file, writing 
>the business logic class/bean/taglib or drawing a pretty visio 
>diagram?

Last time I started a Struts project, I began by identifying all the 
action mappings I'd need.  I was sort of operating along the lines of 
the Struts Catalog principle "Organize ActionMappings into a command 
structure" (<http://husted.com/struts/catalog.htm>).   Think of the 
path mappings as the "API" of your web app.  If you define that, you 
can be pretty free about changing the implementation behind them, 
while having enough structure that page designers (if they aren't 
you) can move ahead in parallel with the coding of the Actions.  Of 
course, Struts makes it trivially easy to change what lies behind the 
mappings, so at an early stage, you can actually map directly to JSPs 
so people can get a click-through experience (good for UI 
prototyping) and then just plug functionality in behind the Struts 
config file as you build it.

This approach led some of my colleagues to try to automate the next 
steps, which led us to the StrutsBuilder project 
(<http://sourceforge.net/projects/rivernorth/>)  StrutsBuilder let's 
you build up the struts config file in a GUI (or import one) and then 
generate stub action classes, JSPs, and other pieces (working from 
Velocity templates which you can customize, although admittedly we 
haven't exactly documented how you'd do that...).

Of course, we're not the only ones who've written code generation 
tools, but I haven't had much experience with any others.

As for diagramming... if you like that approach, you could check out 
Scioworks Camino, which is a visual struts building tool.  I haven't 
had great success with it, but I haven't tried their latest versions. 
And last week on the list we touched on discussions about how to use 
UML to describe Struts projects.  I reviewed the WebUML spec over the 
weekend and found it kind of peculiar in a few ways.  It could be 
adapted to Struts, but I'm not sure that I'm enthusiastic enough 
about the spec to push that.  It seems kind of outdated, and it 
hasn't changed from 0.9 in over three years.  Still, it has at least 
one published book behind it, and some support in popular UML tools. 
(see 
<http://www.conallen.com/whitepapers/webapps/ModelingWebApplications.htm> 
for details.)

Joe
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