Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts ObjectRelational Bridge, Lucene, and Velocity (Expert's Voice)

Building maintainable and extensible web applications requires significant design and planning before even a single line of code can be written. But when you leverage development frameworks, you can overcome the many challenges of web-based development. This book maps out the Jakarta Struts framework, to help you solve everyday web application development problems.

This book concentrates on using Struts to develop the core architecture of a web application, and using other Jakarta projects to create a fully open source web application. Included are Object-RelationalBridge, Lucene, Velocity, and ANT.

User review
Informative and very helpful
As a non-programmer, I found this book to be clear, precise and easy to read. I highly recommend it to people interested in the subject matter, but lacking a technical background.

User review
Wait for the second edition
This book is a reprint of a Wrox book that APress bought when Wrox went out of business. Although the book has a publication date of September 2003, it was actually published by Wrox earlier in the year. Also, APress intends on releasing a second edition of this book (ISBN:159059228X) in December 2003. With that in mind, let's discuss the contents of this book.

The book is broken up into five sections. The first and longest section discusses Struts. This section is very good as it concentrates on developing a Struts application and demonstrates good design while discussing the issues that make bad designs bad. This section ends with a look at using ObjectRelationalBridge (OJB) as a data access tier. Unfortunately the book uses an beta version of OJB (it is still not in release) that makes this section obsolete. The remaining chapters cover other open source tools available to developers including Velocity (template engine), Lucene (search engine), and Ant (build tool). Although it is interesting to see how each tool integrates into the Struts application developed earlier, the chapters are not long enough to give detailed information on any of these tools.

The conclusion is that if you are looking for a book on properly building a Struts application, you probably want to wait for the second edition. Since the OJB chapter is obsolete and the chapters on the other tools are fairly brief, this book doesn't provide anything that shouts, `Buy Me` from the shelves.

User review
very good book
I had a chance to attend one of John Carnell's sessions here in Chicago. I was very impressed with his presentation and the content. After that I bought the book and I am very impressed with the simplicity with which the content is presented.

User review
The Good, the bad, the overloaded
Since software moves quickly, some aspects of the book are already out of date even though it's only a matter of months old. The template tags are already deprecated in favor of the new tile tags and the Object Relational Bridge stuff has changed quite a bit (which is to be expected if you consider it wasn't even version 1 for OJB). I'm glad there's books on these topics in any case.

The first chapter is a nice read and while it's covered everywhere else, they cover MVC well and how it relates to the struts framework.

My biggest pet peeve is with one of what is otherwise their most useful chapter on prepopulating forms and setting forms up. In chapter 2 they talk about the concepts of pre and post setup actions (post as in after). Then in chapter 3 they use a PostStory example (post as in posting an ad, but then again it could be like the post form submit method). They have a PostStorySetupAction and with all the meanings of posts I had trouble not seeing it as an after[post]-before[setup] action. My brain core dumped and in the end I went back with a pen and marked out `post` everywhere in the chapter. If only they could have used AddStory or CreateStory, or I could forget the other overloaded meanings of post I wouldn't have had to reread that chapter.

The one time the book came to the rescue was when trying to mix the validator framework validation with custom validation. extending the ValidatorForm instead of ActionForm was exactly what we needed.

User review
Good start for Struts beginners
This book summarizes Struts and some other technologies related. It can bring you to lot of save times in your beginnigs because It exposes a professional point of view front the use of these technologies and patterns. Not Struts beginners don't purcharse it.