Programming Tutorials

What is Struts? Which Version of Struts to use?

By: Vilyams in Struts Tutorials on 2006-12-12  

What is Struts?

Apache Struts is a free open-source framework for creating Java web applications.

Web applications differ from conventional websites in that web applications can create a dynamic response. Many websites deliver only static pages. A web application can interact with databases and business logic engines to customize a response.

Web applications based on JavaServer Pages sometimes commingle database code, page design code, and control flow code. In practice, we find that unless these concerns are separated, larger applications become difficult to maintain.

One way to separate concerns in a software application is to use a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. The Model represents the business or database code, the View represents the page design code, and the Controller represents the navigational code. The Struts framework is designed to help developers create web applications that utilize a MVC architecture.

The framework provides three key components:

• A "request" handler provided by the application developer that is mapped to a standard URI.
• A "response" handler that transfers control to another resource which completes the response.
• A tag library that helps developers create interactive form-based applications with server pages.

The framework's architecture and tags are buzzword compliant. Struts works well with conventional REST applications and with nouveau technologies like SOAP and AJAX.

Which version of Struts to use?

If you are starting a new project, you should of course use the latest version of struts which is now 6.1.2 as of March 2023. You can download the latest version as well as a previous version from here https://struts.apache.org/index.html