techno.blog("Dion")

There has been a lot said about Struts. Most of what I hear is:

• It sucks! My pet framework is much better
• It is great! Although I have never used anything else
• It is good enough

I have heard the “it is good enough” a lot recently. This especially seems to come up when developers are on project where the requirement is to use Struts. “My boss told I had too”. “It is a corporate standard”.

I especially feel sorry when someone who writes a popular framework is forced to use it ;)

For a lot of people, they have grabbed this reality, and have chosen to make the most of it. This results in work such as Cobbie’s, in which has has adapters which allow him to use actions which work in WebWork 2, right in Struts. Add to this a nice testing framework, and other items (e.g. use SiteMesh rather than Tiles, using Spring, etc) and then it has you wondering. Is Struts that bad?

I think it is definitely usable. I mean people are coming up with good solid applications using Struts. However, I am not sure why I would choose it on a new project (other than for political reasons, or due to the staff [a group of Struts experts]).

I am lucky enough to be working on project where we got to choose the web framework. We can use Tapestry or WebWork and noone has cared. What a pleasure?

What is the future for Struts? I think it is destined to take a U-turn, or it will die in legacy. What is the U-turn? Make it work as that framework on top of JSF, which makes JSF usable ;)