Due to my current Job I have finally had the pain pleasure of getting to know Struts. Somehow despite working in Java Web Development for several years I had managed to avoid Struts. First spending several years working with Turbine and then moving Tapestry 4.
Struts always struck me as a bit of a weak framework as it doesn’t really do much. It simply provides a basic form handling and page logic framework. However in many ways this is it greatest strength. Developers who may not ‘get’ the more wizzy frameworks can quickly produce output.
It’s main weakness (as with so much of Java) is the number of choices you can make. I have often heard the argument that Struts developers are easy to recruit - so it is maintainable. The first part of this is true, however the second I have major doubts.
In our app we have tried really hard to keep it simple - yet most of the ’struts’ developers we found hadn’t use the Struts, Spring, Tiles combination we choose. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I would say based on google almost no-one appears to use this combination :). There are (bad) docs for each bit but virtually none explaining how to plug all the bits together.
Now when I then compare this to Tapestry 5 which is really well structured and clean - I can’t help thinking it would be cheaper to train developers on that.
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