A brief comparison
October 19, 2004
Summary
My JSF article series and Meet the EXPerts appearance on IBM developerWorks received a lot of feedback. I would have to say, the most common question or feedback came along the lines of comparing Struts to JSF.
My JSF article series and Meet the Experts appearance on IBM developerWorks received a lot of feedback.
I would have to say, the most common question or feedback came along the lines of comparing Struts to JSF. I thought it would be a good idea to compare JSF to Struts by evaluating various features that an application architect would look for in a Web application framework. This article will compare specific features. Those on which I will focus include:
Maturity
Controller Flexibility/Event Handling
Navigation
Page development
Integration
Extensibility
Certainly, there are other places in which you might want to do a comparison, sUCh as performance, but I'll focus on the set I just mentioned. I'll also spend more time on the Controller and Navigation sections because they are the heart of the frameworks. Performance of JSF is specific to the vendor implementation, and I always encourage people to perform their own performance tests against their own set of requirements because there are too many factors that can affect performance. A performance evaluation would be unfair. Other areas such as page layout, validation, and exception handling were also left out in the interest of saving space.
Maturity
Struts has been around for a few years and has the edge on maturity. I know of several successful production systems that were built using the Struts framework. One example is the WebSphere Application Server Web-based administrative console. JavaServer Faces(JSF), however, has been in draft for 2 years. Several companies, including IBM as well as the creator of Struts, Craig McClanahan, have contributed to the creation of JSF during that time. Nonetheless, it will take some time to see a few systems deployed.
Struts definitely has the edge in this category. With JSF, however, you can rely on different levels of support depending on which implementation you choose. For example, the JSF framework inside WebSphere Studio comes with IBM support.
Controller Flexibility/Event Handling
One of the major goals of Struts was to implement a framework that utilized Sun's Model 2 framework and reduced the common and often repetitive tasks in Servlet and jsp development. The heart of Struts is the Controller. Struts uses the Front Controller Pattern and Command Pattern. A single servlet takes a request, translates HTTP parameters into a Java ActionForm, and passes the ActionForm into a Struts Action class, which is a command. The URI denotes which Action class to go to. The Struts framework has one single event handler for the HTTP request. Once the request is met, the Action returns the result back to the front controller, which then uses it to choose where to navigate next. The interaction is demonstrated in Figure 1.