http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/most-valuable-personalities-in-java
(Hats off to the author of this article)

what is more pathetic to find is that
there are some people who are for
whatever (personal) reasons are
promoting this technology.

2 cents advise is to use Struts 2, JSF,
Stripes instead of putting thankless
effort and wasting time in the trench.

The ‘moaning’ thing came across more harshly than I intended

I don’t thing Struts 2 is *the* answer, I do think it is a big improvement. To use the bullet points from your original post:

* Verbosity: Better but not perfect. Fewer classes needed, more of them POJO and sensible defaults in the config file.

* Url pattern mapping: Slightly better, if this is a must have , then I’d recommend Spring MVC which is much more power in this area.

* Struts(-config).xml: Better , still suffering for the ‘one place to do config’ – easy to know where to find stuff. Can use includes to split the file if require.

* Not so difficult to test. Struts 2 is pretty much plain Java all the way – a lot easier to (J)unit test. My single biggest reason to make the move.

* Template support: Agree with you here. Use Sitemesh. Even better, use sitemesh pre configured with Struts2 (using Maven and Appfuse)

* MVC v the Web in general: I suppose it depends on the way that you think. Not matter what your point of view, At least Struts (2) isn’t as bad as JSF.

The underlying the bulk of my comment post: All these are reasons to move from Struts 1 (to framework of your choice). Convincing business users isn’t going to be as easy.

Paul

Yes:

http://www.dehora.net/journal/2006/02/web_frameworks_reloaded_just_use.html

“Moaning about Struts 1 won’t help you”

Think of it as documentation. These problems are now written down in one place. Given you think Struts 2 is the answer to Struts 1, I would think you’d be happy to have something to link to that ratifies that.

That’s pretty much what the Struts 1/ Struts 2 guys say as well

Can’t remember the URL, but they give a good , worked through, example on their site.

Paul