Prerequisites: To develop struts2 application you should already knowing following technologies.
- Core Java
- Servlet, JSP, Filters and TAG Libraries
- Java Beans
- HTML and HTTP
- Web Containers e.g. Tomcat
- XML
- Java 5 or higher
- Servlet API 2.4 or higher
- JSP 2.0 or higher
To create a Struts 2 web application with the Struts 2 artifacts added to the the application's class path manually you will need to download the Struts 2 distribution from the Apache Struts website.
On the Struts 2 download page, click on the link for the current General Availability release. In that release's section you'll find several links. To get started with a basic Struts 2 web application you need to only download the Essential Dependencies Only zip file, which is approximately 12mb.
After downloading this zip file, unzip it. You should have a folder named the same as the current general availability release and in that folder will be a lib folder. The lib folder contains the Struts 2 jar files (e.g. struts2-core-X.X.X.X.jar, where X.X.X.X is the version) and other jar files Struts 2 requires (e.g. xwork-core.X.X.X.jar).
As we create our basic Struts 2 web application we will copy from the Struts 2 distribution lib folder just the jar files our application requires. As we add features to our application in future tutorials we will copy other jar files.
- Now in the Eclipse IDE create "Dynamic Web Project" click here to learn how to create Dynamic Web Project in Eclipse IDE?
- Now create new JSP file named index,jsp in WebContent directory and add following content to it
<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <title>Index</title> </head> <body> <h1>Hello World1 Welcome to Struts2 Hello World application </h1> </body> </html> - Now we need to configure struts2 filter in web.xml located at WebContent/WEB-INF/web.xml. The content of web.xml should look like follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <web-app id="WebApp_ID" version="2.4" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd"> <display-name>HelloWorld</display-name> <welcome-file-list> <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file> </welcome-file-list> <filter> <filter-name>struts2</filter-name> <filter-class>org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.ng.filter.StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter</filter-class> </filter> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>struts2</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> </web-app> - After this create action class say HelloAction as follows
package com.test.tejash; public class HelloAction { public String execute() { return "success"; } } - Finally create struts.xml file in the source folder with following content
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.0//EN" "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.0.dtd"> <struts> <package name="hello" extends="struts-default"> <action name="hello" class="com.test.tejash.HelloAction" > <result>/index.jsp</result> </action> </package> </struts>
