Study And Design Of Middleware Based On Struts And JSF Technology

Struts and JavaServer Faces that appeared in recent years are new technologies to Java enterprise users. Struts is an open source J2EE application framework released by Apache organization. It has a flexible control layer and high expandability and it's purpose is to lighten the burden of building enterprise Web applications completely. JavaServer Faces is a server-side technology that can develop Web applications with custom user interfaces. The two technologies mentioned above can't be co-operated directly, so it's impossible to incarnate their advantages in J2EE Web applications simultaneously. It's specified that how to design a Java-based middleware which helps to integrate rich user interfaces of JavaServer Faces and flexibility of control layer of Struts into Web applications in the paper.The middleware has important status in development of software industry in nowadays. The appearance of middleware makes it possible that more and more Internet applications can be developed and applied on different platforms. This function of middleware pops out itself in the period of rapid development of computer technologies. The middleware has been widely used in various fields and many different specifications and technologies of middleware have been brought out. The middleware is new increase point of technology and economy in IT industry with support in global market.MVC separates OOD from visual interfaces by creating model, view and controller these three layers. MVC suits some systems based on Web nowadays and Struts and JSF both are based on MVC. Struts helps to improve reuse of code and flexibility of control layer by using JSP custom tag library and MVC. So Struts has great advantages and a good future in development of complex systems. JSF is a new technology propagandized by Sun Microsystems and it aims at providing a standard framework to develop user interfaces of Web applications. JSF provided some component models with rich representations and the UI components in response to events created by client run on the servers.JSP custom tag library is applied in Struts framework and JSF technology. Thistag library is relatively independent in representation layer. In the same time, the control layer of Struts allow developers to customize their own request processor in details. Based on these two points above, custom JSF components created according to JSF specification and JSF UI components can work together to fulfill the functions of representation layer, while the request processor can be called in control layer of Struts to process different types of page request. By doing the steps above, JSF UI components will be used in representation layer, meanwhile the controller and business logic of Struts will continue to be used in control and model layer.The feasibility of middleware design is analysed after comparison between Struts and JSF. Then the designs and implementations of custom JSF components in representation layer and request processor in control layer is specified. At the end of this paper, the middleware shows its operation effect with an example of Web application and the foreground of development of Struts framework and JSF technology in future is analysed in detail.