design and development

After having worked almost entirely with back end for nearly 4 years, I am having my second take at web tier development with J2EE. Things have changed a lot since my last stint. I found myself using Struts.

I picked this book because of some of the positive reviews for this book. Plus the lead developer on our project asked me to read this book. This book turned out to be a good one.

I especially liked the Chapter 1 that made a case for Struts very well. By the end of Chapter 2 and 3 I found myself writing simple Struts applications.

Chapter 4 had some intermediate level stuff like Struts Actions and some practical advices on using Struts. I was pretty surprised since this book took me to an intermediate stage in a new technology (for me) in just under 40 pages.

Chapter 6 is pretty cool. It talks about quite a bit of advanced tag stuff like
1) customizing image button tags to isolate the Action changes
2) JSTL and Struts-EL
3) A good scheme for multi page navigation (prev, next etc) when the result set is quite large (I am itching to use this at work)
4) Using Pager Taglib with Struts
5) Editing Form with tables.

One small grouse I have regarding this chapter is that it made me refer back to Struts project doucmentation. The chapter states that in the begining that it doesnt repeat tag related docs available publicly. I think it would have been good if all tag info was in the book (even if it was repetition). This chapter is targetted to working developers. For a beginer like me, it took a while to digest this. But once I was through it, it is good.

Chapter 9 is pretty heady stuff. Exception handling in combination with Struts is covered to the last detail. What I liked about the chapter is that, it talks about the exception handling not just from a Struts application but at the system level. Having developed ejb aplications myself and had to pass on exceptions to web tier, I very much appreciate the picture presented in this chapter. I call it "my concise guide to better production support". The chapter is a dense read however.

Chapter 10 seems to be another goodie. I havent had time to read it yet, but I find the lead developer in our project using some stuff out of this chapter to develop to develop framework in our project.

Overall I must say, I am very pleased with this book.

A lot of us are in hurry to come upto speed with new technology and dont have time to read thick books on Struts that start with introduction to J2EE Servlet specification.

This book was such a relief. I recommend it to anybody starting on Struts.

I am avid reader. This is my third Struts book. I went for it since my opinion was "it is inexpensive what the heck". Boy! was I in for a surprise or what...

Since I knew Struts already, I skimmed through the initial introductory chapters. I found some good advice that no other Struts book/online materials offered me so far. Here are some I found (in)valuable:

1) Action Chaining

2) The right way to use Image Buttons for Form Submission

3) Some good JSTL and Struts-EL stuff

4) A great Page Traversal framework.

5) Using Pager Taglib with Struts

6) An expert treatise of Exception Handling that goes far beyond "Here is how you confugure exception in struts-config.xml" and tells
a) When to use Struts declarative exception handling and when not to
b) How Struts exception handling complements Servlet exception handling
c) How to log exceptions in a customer-support friendly way so that they can be cross referenced?
d) How to prevent duplicate logging?
e) Strategies for centralized logging
f) Reporting exceptions

7) Customizing Struts to get some real benefits out of it such as:
a) How to fill the gap between ImageButton and DispatchAction, that's so missing
b) Controlling duplicate form submission in a generic manner rather than dealing with it in a per form basis
c) A pageflow controller
d) A <html:cancel> like functionality when images are used for the cancel button

Struts Survival Guide explains a lot of the Struts platform, and gives many effective code snippets to help guide the learning process. This book is good for someone who is just learning Struts or has previously been exposed to it and wants to learn more about all the bells and whistles. When each concept is introduced it's explained well and then the reason behind why you would or wouldn't want to use the technique is given. That kind of discussion really helps the reader to understand how they might use it in their own application.

I have two main issues with the book:
* The first is all the grammar and spelling errors that plague the book. At times it gets distracting and makes the book a bit tough to follow. But this problem may be easily addressed in a future printing the book.
* The second is their index (or lack thereof). While reviewing the book I was working on a Struts project and would often grab the book to understand a new tag or a new concept that I'd never used before, but the index rarely listed the concept I was searching for even though I knew the book covered the topic because I'd read about it previously. For this reason, I believe the book is better read cover to cover and not as a desk reference. But the $15 price and the 224-page length makes buying it for that purpose easy to handle.

Lastly, the "Struts-Training" companian workbook offered through the ObjectSource website looks promising (http://www.objectsource.com/). The guide hasn't been completed yet, but seems to offer full-length examples and walk-thrus for each of the topics in the book