Programming Jakarta Struts

Configuring the web.xml File for Struts

Although the web.xml file is used for configuring any generic web application, there are a few Struts-specific configuration options that you must configure within this file when using the Struts framework. The next section describes the necessary steps that you’ll need to perform to ensure that your Struts application is properly configured.

Mapping the Struts ActionServlet

The first and perhaps most important step that you need to perform is to configure the ActionServlet that will receive all incoming requests for the application.

Tip

You need to configure only a single ActionServlet, regardless of the number of subapplications that are being used. Some developers choose to set up multiple controller servlets to handle different functional areas of the application. Because servlets are multithreaded, you don’t gain any real performance or scalability value by using multiple ActionServlet mappings. Currently, the Struts framework allows only a single controller servlet to work. This problem surely will be fixed in a future release and might even be resolved before 1.1 goes final. However, you should verify that the problem has been fixed before attempting to use multiple controllers in your application.

There are two steps in configuring the Struts controller servlet in the web.xml file. The first step is to use the servlet element to configure the servlet instance that can later be mapped in the servlet-mapping element. The child ...