in reply to Java Web Frameworks (e.g. Jakarta Struts) vs. Perl's HTML::Mason

I never used HTML::Mason, so cannot compare it with other tools. However my current project uses Jakarta Struts + WebLogic + Oracle.

Therotically I like the struts framework, and it is basically based on Java Servlet. The framework is very neat. But we are currently experiencing some problems.

The effort required is bigger than expected (but did we have the right expectation?). My company had one completed project in Struts, and it was quite successful, however all the pages in the application were very simple, according to a person who is on this project and was on that one. Maybe Struts has a problem with complex web pages (in terms of GUI). But I cannot say this for sure, as most of the people on this project, including myself are new to the Struts framework, so it could be a learning curve thing.

Under the Struts framework, each action is a class, which I see it as the right thing to do, but that obviously increases the effort.

I think the Struts tag library might be part of the problem. I would expect its tag library provides a rich (what is rich?) set of tags for rendering complex (what does complex mean?) web pages, but seems not.

Some other people in my company had a very positive review on code fusion, and they really likes it (especially the tag library), maybe you can take that as a candidate. Those people are doing a real project with CodeFusion now, so their comments are first-hand. But code fusion costs money, and some company probably does not like it, when there are free stuffs available. (Actually my company does not like it, and that's why we don't have many licenses for CodeFusion)

When you evaluate your tools or frameworks, definitely look at the "tag library" very very closely.

  • Comment on Re: Java Web Frameworks (e.g. Jakarta Struts) vs. Perl's HTML::Mason