Scope and Organization
Shortly after I started on the real meat of the recipes I ran into a dilemma. Do I focus on only those issues related directly to Struts? More importantly, should the Solutions only use technology available with Struts? I quickly realized that considering solutions that used Struts exclusively would be a disservice to the developer. Struts overlays and intersects with many other technologies from HTML to JSP to XML. I wanted the recipes to reflect this synergy as well.
Within the pages of this book you will find solutions that use tools and technologies not provided by Struts, such as the use of the JSTL. This ability to plug-and-play using external software tools and libraries demonstrates Struts's flexibility and robustness. If you prefer to use JSTL over the Struts tags, then do it! Struts integrates just fine with JSTL, and I present many recipes that help you along. If you need to display tabular data with sorting and paging, you can roll your own solution or use a third-party library. This book will show you how to use both approaches.
Almost all of the solutions, which use third-party libraries, leverage open source software. Open source software has really come of age in the last few years. Though open source solutions are traditionally linked with bleeding-edge dot-com'ers, it's been my experience that corporate IT shops are now seriously considering and using open source technology alongside traditional vendor offerings.
This environment empowers all ...