Real World Struts

[Will Spies/Towers Perrin <sp...@towers.com>]

We have been dabbling with struts. We have an upcoming project and are
faced with a decision to use Struts or to continue to use plain old JSP.  I
understand the long term benefits of struts however I must do a cost
comparison of using struts as opposed to using JSP. We have developers who
are familiar with JSP and Java and J2EE. Struts would be the only learning
curve ( and it's not exactly a small learning curve ). So, I'm wondering if
anyone has any real world experience that they would like to share
regarding making this transition. Perhaps with estimating the man hours
needed to train some number of existing Java developers in Struts and then
beginning a project building a system with , just as an example, say
roughly 30 screens. Anyone do anything like this for real recently?

Re: Real World Struts

[Thomas Quas <tq...@acm.org>]

Will,

I'm what I would call an intermediate JSP programmer, and switched to
Struts recently. The (one man) project I'm currently working on does not
require modifications in terms of extending the Struts framework with
new factories or the like, but rather focuses on a simple Web interface
and internationalization.

I'm using struts for about two weeks now, and I reached my milestones
fairly quickly. More quickly than if I would have used JSP--which is
what I did before. Struts and its taglibs provide excellent support for
realizing a Web interface rapidly. I also found the mailing list a
valuable resource where I get responses within minutes or hours.

Personally, I found the learning curve not quite as steep as it sounds
when you describe it. It took me two days to get the basic concepts and
realize my first pages. After two weeks I have completed three workflows
containing four pages each--including functional test code using
httpunit. Plus I'm working 4h days...

If your developers have a good understanding of JSP I do not see why
they should have problems with Struts. Au contraire, I found this is an
excellent basis for jumping into Struts since daily work proofed to
require knowledge in both areas. I'm basically using Struts for workflow
issues, form handling & i18n, mixing it with JSP when necessary.


Hope this helps to make the right decision, tom


Will Spies/Towers Perrin wrote:
> 
> We have been dabbling with struts. We have an upcoming project and are
> faced with a decision to use Struts or to continue to use plain old JSP.  I
> understand the long term benefits of struts however I must do a cost
> comparison of using struts as opposed to using JSP. We have developers who
> are familiar with JSP and Java and J2EE. Struts would be the only learning
> curve ( and it's not exactly a small learning curve ). So, I'm wondering if
> anyone has any real world experience that they would like to share
> regarding making this transition. Perhaps with estimating the man hours
> needed to train some number of existing Java developers in Struts and then
> beginning a project building a system with , just as an example, say
> roughly 30 screens. Anyone do anything like this for real recently?

-- 
thomas quas        | "Art lies in the consciousness of doing the thing,
tquas@acm.org      |  in the attention of the happening[...]"
                   |    -- Allen Ginsberg --