Programming Jakarta Struts, Second Edition

New Features of Struts 1.1

The new features in Version 1.1 of the Struts framework are covered in detail throughout this book. Descriptions of the most important ones are provided here.

Declarative Exception Handling

Prior to 1.1, exception handling was left up to the application. There was no support for it in the core framework, and developers were left to their own devices to figure out how to handle exceptions within an application.

Starting with 1.1, exception handling is now part of the core framework. You can declaratively configure which exceptions actions can throw and what should happen when they occur. Chapter 10 covers exception handling in detail and includes details about this declarative methodology.

Dynamic ActionForms

A new type of ActionForm class was added in 1.1, and broader support for it has been added throughout the entire framework. The DynaActionForm and its subclasses allow you to configure form-bean instances in the Struts configuration file. This saves development time because you are no longer required to create ActionForm classes.

Tip

It’s a little too general to say that you’ll never need to create another ActionForm class—however, the number of them that you need to create should be drastically reduced.

See Chapter 7 for more information on this new feature.

Plug-ins

The PlugIn feature was added to the Struts framework to provide a mechanism to notify and initialize services when the Struts application starts up and shuts down. There is a wide range of possibilities ...