Chapter 11 – Additional Useful Struts Packages and Extensions

Though there's not a great deal of detail about how to use some of these more advanced features of Struts 1.1, it's presented as a sort of primer so that as progress continues into more sophisticated application development, the system will have an understanding of what else is available. This chapter highlights on tiles, validator, uploading files, workflow, and other items of interest. Tiles is a framework added into the Struts 1.1 release under the contrib folder. Tiles is completely focused on the V in MVC. The Validation framework is now part of the Struts package structure and can be found in org.apache.struts.validator. The Validator framework is used to make life a bit easier when it's required to deal with required fields, determining matches to a regular expression, email, credit card, and date validation as well as server-side type checking. A number of very useful extensions and packages can be used in, or with, the Struts framework. As more complicated and sophisticated applications are built, the power of these extensions and packages gradually become more apparent.