Spring MVC or Struts

[Khp Virajith]

Hi guys,

I just like to know your ideas on presentation layer technology to be used with Spring-based application. Struts has been leading among the other presentation layer technologies for many years. I have used Struts 1 with Spring and with my experience, I know Struts 1 lacks some essential features. I have not used Struts 2 in an enterprise application yet and I don't have much idea on its capabilities compared to Struts 1. Obviously. you guys must have experience on using them in your projects. Would you mind sharing them?

What about Spring MVC? With easy-to-configure annotation support, it looks promising. I wanna evaluate following 02 technology stacks.

01. Spring-Struts
02. Spring-Spring MVC

I know, it's hard to say which is the best. But share your experience and let me know their pros and cons...
Does anyone feel Spring MVC is feature-rich as same as Struts 2?

Open for discussion.

[David Newton]

I think they're roughly equivalent in terms of capabilities.

Unless you have a previous investment in Struts 2, however, (or like me, just prefer it), I'm not sure if there would be any compelling benefit to using Struts 2--YMMV.

[Khp Virajith]

Hi David,

Thanks David for your response.

Is anybody else to share thoughts?

[Anujit Chatterjee]

Hi,

Well I still think Struts1.x/2.x MVC +Spring is a better combination although Spring 2.5 is quite good but struts mvc is still very simple yet powerful in terms of validation,decoupling of layers and tiles integration.
The only negative thing in the new struts is combining form beans into the controller action.
It was better when we have it separate thereby relating form beans as part of the view layer rather than the controller layer.
Try small POCs with both and then go with the one you like.
After all you should like whatever you are more comfortable with.
Cheers and happy coding !!!

[Khp Virajith]

Hello Anujit,

Many thanks for your response.

Yes, but POCs will do up to some extent only. Because, there can be scenarios that we encounter in real production app development but not in a rapidly developed POC. And developing POCs and compare/contrast all the capabilities of both frameworks need much time. So that's why I just wanted to hear from the people those who have past experience in developing enterprise applications with these two technologies.

As of my analysis, Spring MVC seems to be more flexible with respect to front end features it provide and integration with Spring itself. Still this thread is open to share your views, guys!

[David Newton]

With Struts 2 there's no reason you can't create an object that's used to encapsulate view data and expose it via an action property or via ModelDriven.

Spring integration is pretty strong; I don't see that as a negative.