struts-bank

example online banking to learn how to code in Java, Struts, JSPs, servlets, etc.

Running the code using Struts 1.3.10 and Tomcat v7.0. There is no database backend, all objects are stored in session variables with example objects being created when logging in. You can login using the username "demo", the password is "demo".

References:

• Core Servlets Struts 1.2 Tutorial Slides
• Struts 1.3 User Guide
• Struts 1.3 DTDDoc, displays the schema of the struts-config.xml file
• Struts 1.3 Javadoc, the struts API docs

The front-end uses Bootstrap.

Configuring Struts and Struts URL Routing

In other web frameworks such as Rails and Django you have something called url routing or url patterns. The framework handles the mapping of URLs to controllers. In Struts you have to setup a servlet and then a servlet mapping to handle all URLs that end in *.do.

Setting up the servlet in web.xml:

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>action</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>
        org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet
    </servlet-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>config</param-name>
        <param-value>
         /WEB-INF/struts-config.xml
        </param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

Setting up the servlet mapping in web.xml (using extension mapping):

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>action</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.do</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

See The Web Application Deployment Descriptor chapter of the Struts User Guide for more information.

Creating an Action

An action is known as a controller in Rails, and as a view in Django. It handles some extra logic and directs the user to a certain page.

When creating an action you will need to sub-class from the Action class (its package is org.apache.struts.action) and override the execute method:

public class MyAction extends Action {
    public ActionForward execute(ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {
        // logic goes here, forward to a particular page as a result
    }

See Action Classes in the Struts User Guide.

You also need to define the action in struts-config.xml:

<action-mappings>
    <action path="/MyAction" type="app.MyAction" scope="request" name="myaction" />
</action-mappings>

Each action mapping maps a name to a page or action to display. For example, in the login page, we have the success and errors mappings defined. When logging is in successful, the LoginAction forward to the success mapping. If it fails, it redirects to the errors mapping which is the login.jsp page.

JSTL (JavaServerPages Standard Tag Library)

This project comes with the latest version of JSTL which gives you a lot of convenient tag methods to use in the code.

Download:

• [http://search.maven.org/#browse|707331597](JSTL API 1.2.1)
• [http://search.maven.org/#browse|-1002239620](JSTL 1.2.1)

Stackoverflow has a nice wiki page on the JSTL (including install instructions)