Overview

XView4Struts is an extension to the Jakarta Struts MVC framework. It was born out of a desire and a need to produce applications faster using the Struts framework. This is achieved by removing the need to program jsp pages. There is no longer a need to figure out how to implement the various Struts tags or any other tag library.

With XView4Struts the view layer is pure HTML. This has several implications. You don't need a java developer to write HTML. Many organizations have graphics experts that are more suited for that job. Many organizations prefer to create HTML mock-ups of an application to solicit client approval before they start working on the underlying logic that makes it work. Using this scenerio with the standard Struts view layer, the developer then has to spend many hours implementing jsp tags to make it work with the underlying logic. With XView4Struts the developer only needs to apply id attributes to the standard HTML tags and the framework takes care of the rest.

XView4Struts extends the Struts' requestProcessor and intercepts all forwarding actions to HTML pages. The processor parses the HTML page and if it can it will process any tags implementing an id attribute. If there is no match between the id attribute and a form bean property or an error occurs, the parser simply returns control back to the processor. Since only HTML pages are parsed, XView4Struts may exist in an application that implements the standard Struts view components.

Try this exciting, new approach to developing Struts applications and you may discover that writing JSPs just doesn't make sense any more.

Features

• Faster development time. A whole layer of programming has been removed since there are no JSPs to write. No tag libraries to learn and implement.
• Easier maintenance. There is no logic in the view layer to troubleshoot and maintain.
• A truer MVC design pattern since all logic in the view layer has been removed.
• The developer has an option to use xslt to produce dynamic content. Reusable view components are easy to build using this option. XView4Struts does not use xslt to produce the entire view layer as other implementations of this type do. It is only implemented to dynamically insert content pieces into the HTML document.
• Application templates are extremely easy to implement.
• The parsing functionality is dynamic enough that the developer often has more than one option or technology to choose from to achieve the same result. They simply use what they understand best.

Tested Environments