Struts: The Complete Reference, 2nd Edition
Alternative View Technologies
Before concluding this chapter, it's important to point out again that Struts is an extensible Web framework that allows you to use any technology you desire to develop the View layer of your Struts application. While this chapter has focused primarily on the built-in JSP-related support, there are several alternatives available. The following table lists a few of the options and a brief description, including a URL for each option.
| Technology | Description and URL |
|---|---|
| Cocoon | The Apache Cocoon project is an XML-based Web application publishing engine for generating, transforming, processing, and outputting data. Don Brown created a Struts plugin, Cocoon Plugin, which integrates the Cocoon framework with the Struts framework. http://struts.sourceforge.net/struts-cocoon/ |
| stxx | Struts for transforming XML with XSL (stxx) is a third-party extension of the Struts framework that supports using XSLT (XML Style Language Templates) for the View layer. http://stxx.sourceforge.net/ |
| Swing | Java's Swing library can be used to create rich GUI front ends for Struts applications. The following article illustrates how to do this. http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/Swing/ |
| Velocity | The Jakarta Velocity project is a Java-based templating engine that can be used as an alternative to JSPs. VelocityStruts is a Velocity subproject that integrates Velocity with the Struts framework. http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/tools/struts/ |