Web application w/Struts

[Roger Kjensrud <ro...@cj.com>]

Hello,

I'm dealing with some architectural design issues that I would like to get
some feedback on:

I'm striving for a loosely coupled architecture where each component would
be a web application (.war) that could potentially be deployed in different
JVMs on different boxes. However, all these components would need the same
basic information about the client that is obtained when he/she logs on. A
loosely coupled architecture would mean one ActionController per component
or one "instance" of the Struts framework. In this scenario I could pass the
user information between the components with cookies and/or hidden
fields(including security artifacts).

On the other hand I can package everything into one web application, using
one ActionController with proportionally higher number of Action classes.
This way the sharing of user information would be easily put into a session
object. However, I won't achieve the benefits of loosely coupling, and
maintenance and ownership of the code could become harder(separate teams
working on each component). Also, the security would be easier to handle in
this scenario.

The next part is related more to Struts:
When would you start to split up with into different ActionServlets as
suppose to adding more Action classes with the same ActionServlet? If you
specify several action servlets in web.xml with different mappings, would
these servlets be able to share a session?

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,

Roger Kjensrud