Task Driven vs Event Driven on Struts 2 Action

i had a job to design and develop a new framework for my own development team. we made the decision that we will adopt the struts 2 as my mvc framework.

yes i see the benefit from struts 2 very well, easy to implement and has so many features. until, my team member said “hey, i hate struts very much,  because i have to put many exception-handling and/or debugger inside many events/methods. can we use another framework? or just use the servlet mixed with the scriptlet?”

well i know his concern, it would be easy to read and maintain the code with their exception-handling when your code was still small, but along with the time, you will have your own trouble to maintain the code to stay in a good shape, believe  me, i have had this kind of experience before.

so, i think and try to find a better solution and lucky for me, i found the much better solution with the task-driven approach. maybe for some of you this approach will look like a tricky, but no problem as long as my team could gain a benefit from it and keep the code stay in healthy shape .

well, as a brief introduction for struts 2. this action code,perhaps, is the common way that almost every single struts 2 developer will do. as you can see, you can have many methods that indicates as an “event”

as you can see, i have the events/methods execute(), save(), fetch(), and delete() .

and you can see on the above code, that you have to do the exception-handling four times, one each method.  for me — and team — one is more than enough, easy to read and maintain the code, especially when exception occur.

now, my approach is to convert the familiarity of the event-driven into the task-driven.  so, i just have to add a new parameter that i gave name task , as a flagging parameter. in here i will have only 4 tasks to subtitute the 4 methods, “ execute “, “ save “, “ fetch ” and “ delete “.

implementing the code is easy, just put one extra attribute on the action code, i named it task.

and on the jsp, only add a minor change, and i will give you the comparison between the event-driven and task-driven .

as you can see the difference between those 2 slices of code. i dont know how about you, but i love the task-driven struts more than the event-driven. maybe it’s relative, the answer could be different for another developer, but the most important for me is now my developers are happier to use struts.