Is using ActionForm in Business Tier or Integration Tier good Practice?

[Antany Vasanth]

Hi All,

As per our project architecture, We have Presentation, Business and Integration layers. In presentation layer we are using struts 1.2 and in business layer we are using pure java class which is injected into Action class using Spring DI likewise Integration tier classes are injected into Business Layer.

Here my question is, Using ActionForm object in Business Tier and Integration Tier is Good Practice? If not what is the best way to have detail of form objects in Business and Integration layers.

Thanks,
Antany

[Joe Ess]

Using ActionForm object in Business Tier and Integration Tier is Good Practice?

No it is not. Struts is strictly presentation-tier. You do not want your other tiers dependent on it.

If not what is the best way to have detail of form objects in Business and Integration layers.

I make great use of Apache Commons BeanUtils, which uses reflection to map fields from one bean to another.

If you look at Struts 2 you'll notice it uses plain beans rather than framework-specific classes like ActionForm. This is a huge improvement because one spends less time writing code for the framework and can concentrate on solving business problems.

[Antany Vasanth]

Hi Joe Ess,

Thanks a lot!

The information is very much useful.

Regards,
Antany