Java technologies give developers a serious boost when creating and maintaining applications to meet the demands of today's public Web sites and enterprise intranets. Struts combines Java Servlets, Java ServerPages, custom tags, and message resources into a unified framework. The end result is a cooperative, synergistic platform, suitable for development teams, independent developers, and everyone in between.

Java Servlets are designed to handle requests made by Web browsers. Java ServerPages are designed to create dynamic Web pages that can turn billboard sites into live applications. Struts uses a special Servlet as a switchboard to route requests from Web browsers to the appropriate ServerPage. This makes Web applications much easier to design, create, and maintain.

Struts is committed to supporting industry standards. Our lead developer is a member of JSR052, Sun's Expert group for developing a standard library of custom JSP tags. A primary design criteria is that Struts must be compatible with Sun's J2EE platform for corporate enterprises. In fact, Struts really acts as an integrator of Java technologies, so that they can be used in the "real world".

Struts was created by Craig R. McClanahan, and donated to the Apache Software Foundation in May 2000. Craig is the primary developer of both Struts and Tomcat 4, the basis for the official reference implementation for a servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 container. With stable releases of Struts and Tomcat 4 in circulation, Craig is now the Specification Lead for JavaServer Faces (JSR-127), and is the Web Layer Architect for the Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform as a whole.

There are now many active committers to the Struts project, working cooperatively from around the globe. Other Java developers are invited to contribute to the project. Struts is an Apache Jakarta project, with the common mission to "provide commercial-quality server solutions based on the Java Platform that are developed in an open and cooperative fashion". All told, 17 individual developers and committers contributed to the Struts 1.0 codebase.

Struts itself is markup neutral. The original Struts taglibs are only one example of how presentation layer components can access the framework. The framework objects are exposed through the standard application, session, and request contexts, where any Java component in the application can make use of them.

Markup extensions that use Struts are available for Velocity and XLST, among others. A new Struts tag library for Java Server Faces is also in development.


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