Part 4. Improving your application

At this point, you can build a Struts 2 application. But what about building that application to the highest standards of industry practice? The next three chapters start you on your way to refining your application. We will, of course, be making these refinements to our Struts 2 Portfolio sample application as we go.

In chapter 9, we’ll introduce Spring resource management to our application. Many developers agree that dependency injection is a nonnegotiable component of a well-implemented Java application. We’ll learn to use the Struts 2 Spring plug-in to start letting Spring manage our dependencies. We’ll also bump our persistence layer up a notch or two by introducing the Java Persistence API to our modest application. By the time we get these two things in place, we’ll have a respectable, enterprise-class application in our hands.

Chapter 10 continues the process of improving our applications by showing us how to take advantage of Struts 2’s validation framework to get a metadata-driven validation mechanism in place, one that will prove much more flexible and reusable than the simple validation mechanism we’ve been using thus far. Finally, chapter 11 will expose all the details of the framework’s support for internationalization.