Enhance Struts Framework Using WebControl

Struts is a popular opensource web framework. Struts can help developers build web applications quickly. Being the famous implemention of MVC patters, the Struts framework can be divided into 3 layers, the controller, the model, and the view. Struts relies on JSP and Taglibs on the view layer. The architechture based on HTML and embedded scripts make struts applications difficult to maintain when requirement are given to modify the appearance of the web site which is a main lack of the framework. The current research of the Struts View Layer is focused on using xml and xslt technology. With a limited model and the lack of the xslt, the research got limited success and is not practical in the business.The thesis is based on the research of the entire struts framework. First, it provides an entire new model of WEB page and its components using xml. Then, with the Digester technology, it designs and implements a powerful WEB Generator -- WebControl. The third job which the thesis finished is to extend and improve the current Struts Framework. It simplifies the design and the development of JSP, client side validation and usage of actionform beans. The WebControl+Struts technology has been used on a great telecom project Promis which was cooperated by HP and Singtel. The practice has proved that WebControl+Struts are more efficient and applicable when developing large-scale web applications. A detail comparision has also been given in the end of the paper to shown the advantage of Webcontrol.