Effort converting to Struts?

[Max Tomlinson]

Hi -
Our app, running on WAS 4.0, uses an in-house page dispatcher framework (very similar to Struts) based on an early Sun blueprint. We currently run about 100 JSPs. What would be the rough effort to convert this over to Struts?
thank you,
Max Tomlinson

[Tim Berglund]

Max:
I've found that it takes about one day per JSP/Action/Form triad for typical web data entry forms with a nominal level of bells and whistles in them, once your team is ramped up on Struts. Note that this is starting from scratch, not migrating from another architecturally similar framework.
Key views in our main Struts app (which have many actions and forms associated with them, and no small amount of display logic, tricky HTML, and JavaScript in the JSPs) have of course taken much longer.
I'm not sure what factor to apply to this one-day-per-view rule of thumb to get you to your conversion number. Maybe 0.5? Also, you would want to add some ramp-up time on Struts if your team is not currently experienced. Maybe a 25% charge to the total would be reasonable. The Struts learning curve should not be underestimated.
Lest I sound down on everybody's favorite web application framework, I should say that I am very pleased with what Struts has done to my team's web apps, and I certainly wouldn't want to discourage anyone from adopting it.
Tim
[ May 26, 2003: Message edited by: Tim Berglund ]

[Paul Kelcey]

Hi Max,
Sorry this is not an answer to your question but rather a question since I'm looking at something similar.
I'm wondering what the WAS you are talking about is. I previously worked on a propriety application server called the WAS (Wireless Application Server) and it had a framework (called the Dialog framework) that seems to me to be similar to Struts.
You're not talking about the same thing I guess?
Regards,
Paul Kelcey

[Max Tomlinson]

Paul-
Sorry, the WAS I was talking about is IBM's WebSphere App Server, a J2EE server.
Tim-
Thanks for the info. At 100 pages (and some of ours have some pretty complex JavaScript and Action handler logic, it sounds like a big effort).
Maybe next project!