As someone who has used
Struts and Spring MVC for over 5 years, MVC is much simpler. There is less work to do than Struts and a cleaner looser coupling than Struts.
It is probably because you have years of experience with Struts and then just started learning Spring MVC. The architecture between the two from the perspective of MVC is identical. The big difference is in Spring MVC you "actions" are POJOs, whereas in Struts they are required to extend Action and therefore have to have an Action per URL rather than one class to respond to many URLs.
Core Spring itself is probably the number one reason why people use Spring. it is the Spring Container that gives us all the possibilities to write AOP, Spring MVC, REST,
Soap Web Services, JMS, JMX, RMI, Batch, Integration, etc.
So the most common used is Core Spring.
Just to bring Struts back in. Struts is just a web framework. You can't use it to build other types of applications.
Spring MVC is a web framework and just a module/part of Spring Framework but it isn't the Spring Framework itself.
Mark
