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To James Holmes:

 
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Do you review any rules of thumb in your book as to how to determine if Struts is the best solution to your particular applications web layer and why? The reason I ask is that recently some of the other java developers in my group thought there was too much overhead with Struts to be used with apps that have less than 10-12 jsp's. I thought that was a short-sighted approach and we opted for using Struts to develop a common framework for our web apps, even though some of the apps only have a few jsp pages.

James
 
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Struts: The Complete Reference focuses solely on coverage of Struts and does not cover other frameworks. I think you made the right decision in adopting Struts as a company standard framework. I have seen this at several companies. Of course, Struts may be a little overkill for very small projects, but if it's a standard it does allow you to have a common base that all projects use and thus less maintenance headaches.

James Holmes
http://www.jamesholmes.com/
 
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Originally posted by James Holmes:
[QB] Of course, Struts may be a little overkill for very small projects,



Hi Mr.James,
What if a company is dealing with very small several projects? I think it's not smart to apply Struts on such situation... I'm just trying to learn about the Struts in details and I have no commercial experience using Struts, since the company I'm working for is mostly relied on the small J2EE projects... But they are interested in adopting Struts as the main framework...

Could you please share your experience about the small companies that are on their way to adopt Struts? Thanks...
 
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I feel that even the whole framework of Struts does not adopted by the small companies, the idea is there! We may try to define the view, model and controller, and perform similar thing.

My experience from SCJD was, the project (assignment) was small, and not a web based system, but still, I had implemented my own controller to handle requests, the JTable as view, and the model from the data file, which tried to adopt the MVC pattern.

Thus, I do feel that, even if we cannot use Struts, we should still follow the idea, as MVC really did a good job on the seperation of responsibility of each system component.

Nick
 
James Holmes
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Struts is definitely not a panacea for all projects. If your company is only doing very small projects then Struts may be overkill. Again, though, it can be beneficial to have all small projects use a common framework like Struts so that developers can easily move between projects with little ramp up time.

Hope that helps,

James Holmes
http://www.jamesholmes.com/
 
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Originally posted by James Holmes:
Again, though, it can be beneficial to have all small projects use a common framework like Struts so that developers can easily move between projects with little ramp up time.



It may also work to your advantage in that apps frequently start small and grow in size and complexity. We have many small apps as well that were started before/without struts. We constantly get work requests for enhancements, feature changes, etc on these apps. That's the life of a business app, after all! ("Wow, cool! Now can you make it do *this*?) This evolution makes the apps grow in size and complexity, and several of them have been found lacking in growth capabilty--and hence we wanted them moved to struts. Struts provides much room for growth without as much pain.

So, if you have a business community who never really knows all the features they want, give struts some consideration even for the small apps.
If you decide not to use struts, at least keep your logic extracted into separate classes rather than in your servlets/JSPs so your app can grow without as much pain later.
 
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