Thursday, November 4, 2010

Struts2 Analysis

Recently i got the chance to work on struts2. Briefly, its a J2EE MVC web framework like struts-1, JSF, ADF etc. During development, I found following its pros and cons:-

Pros:
1. Excellent support for Spring, Freemarker, Tiles, AJAX, JQuery etc.
2. Very easy to understand as compared to Struts-1, JSF & ADF
3. Highly configurable & extendable framework
4. Builtin support for token generation,Internationalization etc
5. Good abstraction away from Servlet/JSP
6. Struts2 tags are simpler to use
7. Good builtin Validation framework
8. New version of MyEclipse 8.6 has builtin support for Struts2
9. Good management of properties files like global level, package level and action level

Cons:
1. Poor documentation.
2. Struts2 themes make the framework harder to understand and slower. In order to develop or update themes, someone must know Freemarker language.
3. Immature internationalization support.Tags not fully support of localization.
4. Interceptors are not flexbile enough as compared to Filter. As you can not define interceptor in web.xml alongwith parameters.
5. No builtin pagination and data grid support.
6. Problem in localization for display tag