Programming Jakarta Struts, Second Edition

Appendix A. Changes Since Struts 1.0

There have been many changes to the Struts framework between Versions 1.0 and 1.1. Although these changes were discussed throughout this book, this appendix consolidates them and highlights the most important of the new features. It does not attempt to list every change throughout the framework; as for any Struts release, your best bet for obtaining detailed information is to review the release notes at http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/userGuide/release-notes.html.

ActionServlet and RequestProcessor

A new class called RequestProcessor was added to the framework in Struts 1.1. This class takes over much of the work that the ActionServlet class performed in previous versions. With 1.1, you can still configure the class name of the ActionServlet that you want to use for an application in the web.xml file, but the RequestProcessor now carries out much of the real request-processing work.

By default, applications use the org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor class to handle all incoming requests. You are not required to do anything if the default behavior suits your requirements. You can, however, choose to override the default implementation with one of your own. You can switch implementations by configuring the controller element in the Struts configuration file. See Chapter 4 for more details on configuring the controller element.