[Frank]

Hello,

Just thought I would say hello, I purchased MyEclipse yesterday.
I’m coming from a ASP/ASP.NET background.

I do not know struts, but have done some JSP and Servlet programming.
I am also trying to learn JSF.

One thing about java, there seems to be alot of ways to do the same thing.

Questions:

1. What is the best way/book to learn Struts?
2. Same as #1 for JSF.

Your editor seems to be farther along for struts development, so I guess I’ll have to wait on JSF. I like the visual drag/drop programming.

I like learning my doing small applications, so books that show you how to build real world apps would be best for me.

Thanks

Looking forward to future releases.

Regards,

Frank

[Riyad Kalla]

One thing about java, there seems to be alot of ways to do the same thing.

That is an understatement 😀

Answer to 1 & 2: I would suggest learning JSF. The original creator of Struts went off to join the core JSF team that designed the JSF spec and now the Struts “migration plan” is create a new version of Struts (2.0) that is built ontop of JSF. So the bottom line is Struts life as we know it is limited and JSF has been getting a perverse amount of attention recently.

For JSF I would suggest getting JSF in Action for Kito Mann and then checking out his site (JSFCentral.com). There are a TON of tutorials there that will get you started building simple little apps. Also you can checkout our JSF Quickstart guide that will show you how to use MyEclipse and JSF together: http://www.myeclipseide.com/images/tutorials/quickstarts/jsf/

I feel learning JSF is likely the safest way to go, but if you started to learn JSF and hated it, I would definately suggest checking out Tapestry. It’s an open source web framework over at Apache’s Jakarta site and the people that use it, love it. Both Tapestry and JSF are component based approaches, where you don’t so much care about the Request and Response of your webapp and store things in the session (like Struts and classic web frameworks) but instead you treat everything like a GUI widget and add action listeners to them. It was a hard paradigm switch for me to get when I started but you get used to it quite enough and it’s pretty robust.

JSF does have some bugs in it right now which can make you pretty damn nuts, but they are progressing fast and there are two implementations of it: Sun’s Reference Implementation (RI) and the MyFaces implementation (open source).

Your editor seems to be farther along for struts development, so I guess I’ll have to wait on JSF. I like the visual drag/drop programming.

Yes eventually the JSF support will be like this and better (visual page designer, etc.).

I like learning my doing small applications, so books that show you how to build real world apps would be best for me.

The book I mentioned above goes through 6 chapters of building an issue tracking system using JSF, that is what I loved about it… it was a real app that you might deploy in your office.

[Frank]

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions.
I do like JSF and think I will start working on learning that.
I will check out Tapestry also.

I work in a Hospital IS department and am the only web developer.
We use SQLServer and MySQL.

So, productivity is important to me.
Thats why I was doing the .net thing.
But I really like java also, (maybe better).

Best Regards,

Frank

[Author]

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