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Introduction and Target Audiences:
“Struts in Action” by Manning Publications is an excellent work on the emerging Struts technology framework. Being a complete book on Struts it not only helps the novice developers but also makes it easy for the experienced people to get their application to work according to “Struts” methodology. Although author had tried to make this as a start-to-finish book which can be readily referred by professional developers but still he had given only a brief knowledge regarding the related technologies required along with struts. Through this author seems to make his point clear that the readers will get a comprehensive stuff which mainly deals with the struts framework and the interaction between the various technologies. This makes the book as one of the serious and well designed effort by the author. Familiarity of the readers with certain web application related concepts will definitely prove helpful for them. Moreover prior knowledge of Java syntax will help them grasping the concepts with more ease. Although knowledge of above mentioned skills are required in order to have a quick and better learning from the book but rather these are not essential for starting with “Struts in Action”. No other book on Struts gives such detailed knowledge-rich text on the topic as this gives to its readers.
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Organization of book:
Looking merely at the list of chapters one can easily make out the amount of hard work done by the author while writing the book. The entire Strut content had been divided into seventeen chapters in the book. Each chapter deals with one or the other important concept of Strut framework. While chapter one introduces the web application development and Struts to the readers, chapter two says much regarding the Struts architecture. These two chapters together make up for the introductory part of the book as from here the book straight way goes on to the application development phase.Chapter three initiates the actual implementation cycle as it gives the readers a basic know-how of Struts application development. It enables the readers to develop their own simple web application. The idea of a simple application with all the necessary details
required for the readers had worked out well in the book. Taking the application development issue further chapter four discusses the various configuration elements which can help the developers in building and deploying their application. The application resources file, the Ant Build file, Struts Configuration file had been discussed in an effective way.
While traversing the book one will definitely notice the ease with which each new topic comes and by the time it finishes the reader finds himself well-through the taught concept. Chapter five covers the Struts ActionForm. This chapter deals with some of the important features like life cycle, responsibilities, consequences and characteristics of ActionForm design. Chapter five and six are important from implementation point of view as these chapters tells you some of the important struts concepts required for a robust web application. Chapter six is about Struts Action Forwards, their working, usage of runtime parameters and dynamic forwards. Moreover this chapter also gives the users an additional option of providing their own Action Forwards.
How an Action class is reused and configured for different tasks is what chapter seven speaks about. The Struts Action Mapping being the foundation of Struts Controller had been explained in an effective manner. Moving on to the Struts Action object, author spends some quality time in explaining the struts Action, their usage, chaining of actions and some other standard Actions. These chapters being important from developers’ point of view had attracted maximum of author’s time. Where chapter eight had enough of Struts ActionObject , chapter nine focuses mainly on the Struts ActionServlet, its role in the application, processing of requests, the Exception handler, and also the customization of ActionServlets suiting to the developers’ needs. Chapter ten in itself is sufficient enough to let the readers become well-acquainted with the Struts JSP tags and server pages. It also discusses regarding the writing and Installing of tag extensions. Chapter eleven tells the readers how they can develop their application with Tiles along with the usage of Struts and Tiles Framework together.
Each individual chapter of this book says some or the other important aspect of Strut. It also gives the readers an added advantage that they can quickly refer to the index and learn from the chapter which suits their requirements the most. Next chapter following the similar lines is fully devoted to the Validation of user inputs. While chapter thirteen covers the Struts Internationalization issues, chapter fourteen teaches you how you can use data services with Struts. Developers can look out for some valuable guidance from this chapter as it can solve much of their data related queries. Understanding applications usage of databases, integration of application with data services, usage of data layers for data service connection are some of the prominent features of this chapter.
Chapter fifteen presents an enterprise-grade application that pulls out all the stops and demonstrates the key Struts features and add-ons in one package. This example application Artimus tells the user how he can use Tiles, Validator and Scaffold all in the same application. This chapter mainly tries to highlight the best and the brightest features of Struts. Chapter sixteen allows all those developers who want to upgrade their struts 1.0 application to the new 1.1 features. Various added and attractive features like dynamic ActionForms Action-based Security, plug-ins and multiple modules together make up 1.1. Last chapter of this book shows how Velocity Template can replace JavaServerPages when used with Struts. Here the author makes use of the same application as used in chapter three to demonstrate the usage of Velocity Template. Comparison of Velocity templates along with JSPs had also been done.
Finally:
“An excellent book by a sincere author”. This would be the best comment for the hard work which the authors had done while writing this masterpiece. Everything right from title to cover, to the knowledge-rich text, seems to be so perfect that there is hardly any chance to point a finger for some mistake. The text is well complemented by some eye-catching application examples demonstrating the best practice techniques. Author from his side had tried to put in all his experience and knowledge while writing this book. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone who is even slightly interested in working with Struts Framework. I bet, once started the book he/she will not be able to leave it unless completing it fully.Strictly a “no-nonsense” book on Struts for every web application developer.
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