JavaServer Faces

Using the Struts-Faces Integration Package

If you have a large application developed with Struts, using all the latest bells and whistles, such as the validation framework, modules, Struts-Tiles, and so on, you probably want to stick to Struts, at least for now. A Struts-Faces integration package being developed by the Struts community lets you replace the action elements from the Struts and JSTL tag libraries in the JSP pages with actions from the JSF tag libraries representing the more powerful JSF components. You can do this a few pages at a time if you can’t do it all at once, because the integration package supports a mixture of the old-style pages and pages with JSF components.

Based on the early access version that’s available at the time of this writing, all it takes are a few configuration changes, such as replacing the standard Struts RequestProcessor class with one that can handle both Struts and JSF requests, and using a few new Struts action elements that are part of the integration tag library. The Struts-Faces integration package takes care of all the details needed to tie things together by plugging in custom versions of a few JSF classes, so requests to be processed by Struts Action subclasses are passed on to Struts, and JSF requests are processed by JSF.

For more information about the Struts-Faces integration package, keep an eye on the Struts home page at http://www.Jakarta.apache.org/struts/.