Jakarta Struts Cookbook

Conventions Used in This Book

In addition to the normal typographical conventions of an O'Reilly book, Struts has a large number of confusing terms. I've reduced that confusion by adopting some programming conventions throughout the book.

Programming Conventions

Throughout the book, I use the following conventions regarding Struts actions:

action

Refers to the concept of an action

Action

Refers to the Java class

action

Refers to the <action> element in an XML file

Java classes and interfaces are always written in constant width with the first character in upper case. When I refer to a particular method of a class, I use the convention of ClassName.methodName( ). This does not mean that the method is static; instead, it is just a convenient means of reference.

When XML, HTML, and JSP elements and tags are referenced in text, the angle braces are omitted and appear like forward, td, and bean:write. When I refer to a Struts configuration file, I use the canonical name, struts-config.xml, though you can give these files any name that you prefer. Similarly, the Validator and Tiles configuration files are referred the validation.xml and tiles-defs.xml canonical names.

Typographical Conventions

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Plain text

Indicates menu titles, menu options, menu buttons, and keyboard accelerators (such as Alt and Ctrl).

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, directories, and Unix utilities.

Constant ...