Chapter 18
Introduction to Struts 2

In Chapter 10, “Application Design” you learned about the advantages of the Model 2 architecture and how to build applications based on that model. This chapter introduces Struts 2 as a framework for rapid Model 2 application development, starting with a discussion of the benefits of Struts 2 and how it expedites Model 2 application development. It also explains the basic components of Struts 2: the filter dispatcher, actions, results, and interceptors.

Introducing Struts 2 configuration is another objective of this chapter. Most Struts application will have a struts.xml and a struts.properties files. The former is the more important as it is where you configure your actions. The latter is optional as there exists a default.properties file that contains standard settings that work for most applications. At the end of this chapter, you will rewrite the app10b application and witness how Struts 2 reduces the amount of code you need to write.