Author: JT Smith
14-Nov-01 – Jcorporate Ltd. today unveils its Expresso 4.0 application
development framework, a major release which now includes integration with
the Apache Jakarta Struts Framework. This is exciting because Struts and Expresso are by far the
two most popular open source frameworks and comprise by estimates 85% of
the OSS Java application development framework community market. This integration
is important leap for Java developers utilizing either framework solution.
Expresso is the leading OSS Java application development framework, a foundation
set of reusable, standards-based Java software components designed to shorten
time-to-delivery of Web applications. Expresso is popular with more than
70,000 downloads and a large active listserv community of over 4000 members strong. Expresso is available today for download at http://www.jcorporate.com/product/expresso.html.
With Release 4.0, Expresso has further strengthened the power of shared industry open standard solutions with the integration of the Apache Jakarta Struts framework. By leveraging shared standards such as Java, JSP, Servlet,
XML, J2EE, Javamail, Cactus, Log4J, JUnit, XercesXalan, and Struts, Jcorporate empowers businesses to design and implement unique, adaptable, and unrestricted solutions that are independent of platform and application server.
Struts is an ideal complement to Expresso. Struts is a MVC light weight framework emphasizing presentation and application configuration,
and bringing a powerful tag library to Expresso. Expresso 4.0 is a powerful
and broad application development framework with components for developing
database-driven web
applications. Struts concentrates on specific areas of the application development
process, whereas Expresso adds capabilities for database-stored security, robust object-relational mapping, background
job handling and scheduling, self-tests, log4j logging integration, automated
table manipulation, database connection pooling, email connectivity, event
notification, caching, internationalization, XML automation, testing, registration
objects, configuration management, automatic database maintenance and on
and on.
With Release 4.0 Expresso has made Controller objects (the basic unit of business logic in Expresso) available to Struts as Actions, so the URL mapping, configuration, and other great capabilities of Struts are available – with all of the advantages that Expresso provides. Developers will be interested in Expresso if they need to communicate with databases often, don’t want to write their own security for servlets and actions, and need a lot of the hard work taken out of writing object to relational table mapping. Expresso also provides extensions to the internationalization capabilities of Struts, and simplifies the creation of Action objects (Controllers in Expresso) while at the same time providing additional capabilities that make creating business logic even easier. Expresso is about speeding time to market. The choice of UI is up to the developer with Expresso, and JSP, generated HTML, and XML with optional XSL tranformations are all supported. There’s even a built-in UI to interface with popular spreadsheet applications directly. If and when the client’s project scales to J2EE, the components are easy to scale up into this environment – Expresso’s
Database Objects can be deployed as CMP Entity EJB’s, and Controllers can
be extended into Stateless Session EJB’s. Struts is a perfect project
for Expresso to integrate with, as the two frameworks are parallel in design
techniques in the area of UI and presentation, yet with not much overlap.
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