Helpful review after coming from BEA Weblogic Workshop

I just completed a 5-month corporate contract, prototyping an intranet app using BEA Weblogic/Workshop, without prior Struts experience. Now this book makes more sense to me than when I first picked it up in 2003!

Workshop "page flows" provide a layer over Struts, aggregating related actions into one construct, not unlike Struts "modules"?! Too bad this book does not cover these, they certainly were available with Struts 1.1, which this book covers (see http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/10/30/jakarta.html)

Still though this book has its value. For instance, section 4.1, "Creating An Action" describes some practices for working around what is seen particularly by the Spring community (I spent the first month and a half using Spring rather than Workshop) as the major drawback of Struts -- that the Struts action class must be directly extended, resulting in unnecessary coupling to the framework, lowering testability, etc.

Fair enough, but the Struts examples in the Spring literature are typically shoddy. This volume has a couple of valuable recommendations in this regard, the first being to create "a base action class for the application", which will helps focus the coupling. Next "to enforce the contract between the base class and any subclasses, make the base class abstract".

It is nuggets like these that make this book worthwhile, though, recalling my own attempts with this volume a couple of years ago, I would not recommend it to anybody who is not at least mid-level.

Other Reviews

• Too wordy
• Decent quick intro but hard to read
• Helpful review after coming from BEA Weblogic Workshop
• Poorly written and completely useless