“What Shale isn’t is a shrink-wrapped, well-documented, well-tested product complete with an automated installer and a polished management interface. now find out what it is, as Brett McLaughlin unveils this mighty – and rightful – heir to the legacy of Struts. In this first of a five-part series, Brett explains what Shale is, how it’s different from the Struts framework, and how to install and set it up in your development environment.”
I had read before that the Struts project was going to adopt WebWork as Struts 2.0. Sounds like Struts is planing to add features by just replacing itself.
If this is true then I’m sure that some people will defect from Struts. Maybe Shale will be a good alternative.
I have personally never used it, but two of my friends who are also developers agreed that they don’t like it very much. I can’t remember why though.
Struts is problematic. It really shows its age . It used to be ok around 2001 but now, it is one of the worst if not the worst framework in existence.
Struts has become slowly but surely the DOS of web development. Everyone is hating it, but is doing it because there are big customers who demand it.
Anyway it is good that both successor projects opting now for a different approach. Shale does not really have anything to do with struts itself except that a huge part of the former Struts developers now are working on it. JSF is a nice foundation and Shale slowly is becoming a really good extension framework to JSF (sort of like Spring is to J2EE)
As for the Struts Ti and Webwork merger, we will see what will come out of it. Struts was halfway stagnating and even the next release does not add most things the framework badly needs, Webwork although considered to be a good framework never got a huge exposure.
So it will be interesting what the results will be. Anyway as I see it the days of Struts in huge corprate use are numbered anyway, it is falling behind all other frameworks by the day and only still has this exposure because the corporate world moves more slowly than the rest.
Can someone be a little dove and point me to a few links for a curious budding web developer. Its nothing I’m going to do full time or professionally, just have a few ideas I want to play around with for a website. But I’d like to know what a framework is and how they are used. Don’t be afraid to use a couple of analogies if it will help.
Give ruby on rails a shot, that one might get you kickstarted easiest…
http://www.rubyonrails.org/
I was looking into ruby on rails because of the press that it has received. I’d still have to say I’m lost on what it does. I just want a website that will explain it to me like I’m 8 years old.
…for our sites. In fact we just finished porting a bunch of old ASP code over to our OAS server, using struts as the framework.
It’s O.K. Some things don’t work well… For my own sites I just use python or php, using SQLite and do some CGI stuff… it’s basic, but it works.
I love RIFE, no need for extra projects 😉 http://rifers.org
Seriously though, it’s good that things are moving away from struts, in any way 🙂
TaterSalad, to understand web frameworks you must first put in the time and effort of writing some webapps by-hand. Start with Perl/Python/Ruby CGI (or Java servlets) — just pick whichever language you like best.
Struts is quite overrated. I don’t mean that it’s all bad, but it’s not so good as to deserve all the interest it receives from companies. Lately they’re all asking “Could you do this with Struts?” and well, sure, if that’s what you want.
What’s funny though is that all the movement around the development of Struts (the split into to frameworks, Webwork as Struts 2.0 (maybe), Shale, etc) is something companies (management) don’t yet know about. A lot don’t even know about JSF.
So, at some point all this is going to hit them in the face. “What? Struts is outdated? 2.0 isn’t anything like 1.x? Which way should we go?”
That the corporate world often is 5 years behind the adoption curve, Struts for some strange kind of reason made it into a defacto standard there, the main problem I see with struts, and given the recent developments in the struts world, the Struts developers themselves see it that way either.
Struts is a technolocical dead end road. The problem is that in modern intranet applications people demand more and more behavior which they are used from a rich client ui, you can provide this with struts if you force it, but it is cumbersome and you shoot yourself out of any standards in the web component area that way (Taglibs are limited one way or the other you need events)
Add to that that Struts has way too much overhead in its configuration part for what it wants to achieve and you can see a legacy technology which will be dragged on for a long period of time. Most developers hate Struts, they only do it because there is a demand for it.
Even the core struts people themselves say, if you can try to shift towards JSF and that probably will be the road which will be followed, keep the struts codebase alive but extend it with JSF.