Coding your second Jakarta Struts Application
by Keld H. Hansen
Introduction
Did the title of the article make you curious? If this is the
second application then what was the first one?
The answer is, the first application was presented in my
previous article about
Jakarta Struts,
"Stepping through Jakarta Struts".
Here I showed you:
- how to download and install Struts
- the directory structure of a Struts application
- how to create the first pieces of a new application
- the contents and purpose of the configuration files
- how to build a simple Struts HTML page using taglibs
- how to code an ActionForm class
- how to code an Action class
- and finally how to test your application
The "application" that I used as the example was a simple HTML
page containing a form with the common
controls--text and textarea fields, radio buttons, a checkbox,
a selection list (drop down), and a submit button.
The submit button would simply submit the form to the page again,
and despite the simplicity of the application,
all of the main pieces of the Struts framework were being used.
In this article I'll show you how to take one more step up the
Struts ladder. This time we'll build a classic
list-detail application with the well-known CRUD-actions: Create,
Read, Update, and Delete.
The DVD library application
Reuse is a good thing, so I decided to take the specs for our
second application from a previous article of
mine,
"Java and JDOM: the perfect couple".
Here, a small web application that could manage a
collection of DVDs was built. The DVD information is held in an
XML file. The application
consists of two pages, a DVD List page and a DVD Detail page.
Here's the List page first:
When you click on one of "Id"-hyperlinks you'll go to the Detail
page:
As you can see there are 7 functions in total to implement: list,
detail, save, update, create, delete and
cancel. The flow of the application is as follows:
In the JDOM article, I used a very simple MVC-architecture using
only jsp-pages (even for the controllers)
and JavaBeans. The beans can be re-used in the Struts application,
and also the html layout. To finish the
Struts application we'll have to:
- write the proper configuration files (struts-config.xml and
ApplicationRessources.properties)
- code ActionForm and Action classes for the 7 functions
- write the two jsp-pages using Struts tags
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