Building JEE Web Applications Using Struts

Duration:	2 days
Type:	intermediate

Description

This course enables JEE Web Application developers to incorporate the Struts Framework into their designs. All aspects of Struts development are covered including the core architecture, error handling, validation and Tiles.

This is a workshop based course with delegates spending the majority of their time implementing new web applications and enhancing existing ones.

Prerequisites

Delegates attending this workshop should be competent Java programmers with a good understand of standard Web Application development using JSP's and Servlets

List of Modules

Review of J2EE Web Application Design

The lifecycle of a Java Servlet

The lifecycle of a Java Server Page

Creating and deploying Web Archives

Request dispatching and state management

Using JSP 2.0 Expression Language

The Model2 design for Web Applications

The Struts MVC Architecture

The ActionServlet Front Controller

The RequestProcessor Application Controller

Control components and the Action class

Model components and the ActionForm class

View components and the Tag Libraries

The Struts deployment descriptor

The Struts Tag Libraries

Using HTML Tags to build a client view

Encapsulating conditionals and iteration using the Logic Tag Library

Creating and manipulating JavaBeans using the Beans Tag Library

Nesting the Struts JSP Tags

Overlap between Struts and the JSTL

Integrating the JSTL using Struts EL

Creating a Struts Based Application

Configuring the ActionServlet in web.xml

Creating a Struts deployment descriptor

Coding Action and ActionForm classes

Writing the input and output JSP's

Deploying and testing the application

Introducing Dynamic ActionForms

Exception Handling in Struts

Default exception handling behavior

Declaring global exception handlers

Declaring local exception handlers

Using ActionMessage objects

Adding errors in Action classes

Presenting error information in JSP pages

Storing error text in resource bundles

Advanced Struts Development

Mapping multiple requests to a single controller using DispatchAction

Mapping multiple URL's to a single controller using MappingDispatchAction

Pre-built actions for request dispatching

Using Dynamic Action Forms to avoid manually creating ActionForm classes

Creating Struts plug-in components

Customizing Struts by extending the RequestProcessor class

Using Tiles to Create Template Views

Introducing template based layouts

Using the Tiles Framework with Struts

Creating a Tile based layout

Inserting content into a layout

The Struts Validator

The history of the Validator project

Using the Validator with Struts

Configuring validation-rules.xml

Configuring validation.xml

Using validation in ActionForms

Adding new validation rules

Possible Successors to Struts

The JavaServer Faces (JSF) Architecture

WebWork and the Struts 2 framework

Spring MVC and WebFlow