Struts2 Documentation
Where is it? Clearly I'm missing something here. There's a wiki with some good getting started overview stuff and some other chicken scratching but I'm yet to find an actual reference telling me what's actually allowed in struts.xml. Shouldn't that be pointed to in a big neon sign? The struts.xml page on the wiki isn't exactly comprehensive and while the DTD is listed on the examples page it's not exactly commented..
Oh and did I mention that wiki's are a horrible way to write documentation?
May 26th, 2007 at 11:05 am
You might find this useful: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/starting-struts2 As for the wiki docs, I agree that professional docs should be done in a different way, but for an open source community, the wiki format is much easier to maintain on a casual basis, and the easier things are to maintain, the more likely they will stay up-to-date.
May 27th, 2007 at 8:17 am
It’s deja vu all over again.
Years ago back in the early days of Struts, when I had to built an application for my employer at the time, I remember encountering similar issues with the scant documentation on the web for Strut’s tag libraries, which I felt at the time, were not very robust when used improperly. You either got the usage right, or you spent hours, or even days scratching your head, aided only by a couple of web pages as a token effort by the developers to supply some documentations, or if you’re lucky, a handful of forum posts from people as confused as yourself.
It goes to show that free software is only ‘free’ if your time is worthless.
May 27th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Don,
Thanks for the link to the minibook, it still doesn’t give any real useful information on how to actually use struts2. Lots of architectural overview and specific examples but still nothing on what actual options are available etc. As for the wiki, it doesn’t matter how easy it is to contribute if the result is useless. The struts2 wiki hardly even got started with providing useful documentation let alone being complete and then kept up to date. It’s unfortunate that so many projects make the mistake of thinking that wikis are easy for people to get started editing (generally the need to login and learn wiki markup turns people off) and that putting up a wiki will suddenly cause documentation to spring up out of nowhere. The reality is that regardless of how easy a wiki might make it to contribute, the hardest part is still actually taking the time to write up good documentation. The only people in a place to do that are the developers - noone else has the knowledge of how to use the project and they can’t get that knowledge without good documentation.
May 27th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
I don’t think anyone is under the delusion that just by putting up a wiki, every user will immediately contribute to it, creating high quality documentation. What it does is make it easier to modify, even just for the developers. If the Struts 2 docs were a Word doc, for example, I can just about promise you it wouldn’t be accurate, if it were maintained at all. With a wiki, particularly Confluence, we can do things like the use the Snippet Plugin [1] so our code snippets can be in our source code, yet also be included in the documentation. Also, it is an easy way, for the few users that choose to, improve the docs themselves, and yes, that does happen in the Struts 2 docs. Mainly, I’ve found the wiki is a place where the lessons learned from the lists generally are canonized, and that in itself is valuable, IMO. As far as professional books, I know of at least four books coming out this year, two of which are free, so hopefully we’ll get the best of both worlds.
[1] http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Snippet+Plugin
May 27th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Don,
The wiki doesn’t contain useful information as it stands - it’s simply awful. It shows all the indications of something that people think someone else will contribute to. It’s really very clear by trying to use it as a source of information that noone is actually making useful contributions to it. It’s not functioning well in any of the modes that documentation is needed - reference, tutorial or recipe/solutions. The fact that the source code can be in SVN confluence is completely useless - the actual explanation is what’s important and that would get out of date even if the code snippets automatically update.
I’m not sure that professionally produced books will necessarily solve the problem either unless they are focussed at the various areas required, particularly tutorials/getting started and reference information. There needs to be an actual effort made by the core team and it needs to be a priority - currently it clearly isn’t and it’s drastically reducing the value of the work they’re doing.
June 23rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Hey do you have an ebook link for struts2 ???
pls send it on nisarg1184@gmail.com
Thanks!!
July 9th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
I have a set of articles I wrote to help people learn Struts2. Check it out at http://www.wantii.com. It is a work in progress, but my goal is to be a helpful resource for people learning from the ground up. There are also tutorials at http://www.roseindia.com that are helpful.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
I’ve been trying to code a simple content management system in struts 2 for 3 months now. The documentation is just not good enough, with hardly any useful examples. It’s just pathetic, and a real shame as struts 2 is obviously very powerful. I give up, I’ll use php instead.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:13 am
I started on Struts2 a month ago. I first did some samples in Roseindia - http://www.roseindia.net/struts/struts2/ which is quite a good start.
But there are a lot of things which I still havent got working or knowing if it is an implemented feature or not.
For example, if I wanted to have a radio button in a table, which is working UI wise but I am unable to get information in the action class as to which radio was selected.
I am now trying to figure out how can CMS be implemented. Guess it is just digging out on google :(