Struts Extensions to Java 5, JavaWUG Presentation
Over the last few months I have been working on a set of extension for Struts based on the capabilities of the Java 5, in particular annotations. The project came about after I had been working quite extensively with component-based frameworks such as JSF and Tapestry. I was then asked to implement an application in Struts. Initially, I was reluctant, but after a while I decided to try implement some of the productivity features I felt Struts was missing.
The result is a set of Java 5 extensions, which I will be open sourcing. I presented these extensions for the first time at JavaWUG in the Oracle City offices in London on Friday last week (March 17). I was particularly fortunate to have in the audience two Struts committers, Niall Pemberton, as well as the orginal developer of Struts, Craig McLanahan, who had been in the UK delivering the keynote as well as other presentations at JavaUK06.
On the whole, the presentation went pretty well, although I did feel under quite a bit of time pressure to cover the new features in less than an hour. Apparently, I took 53 minutes. There is also still a question of the name of the project. My provisional name was "StrutsPlus", but I don't think the Apache people will like that too much. I'd probably be more comfortable with my own name. As soon as I have figured this out, I'll post the slides on the web site and here.
I'll be posting a lot more on this project, because I think that it has a lot of potential. It certainly seems to answering a lot of the questions I have about what an ideal MVC-style web framework should look like.