What are the alternatives to Struts 1.3

Question

My product presently uses Struts 1.3 for web GUI development. This was more or less thrust upon us as an organizational directive. Of late, we are having problems with it. The main main point is its steep learning curve - the new web developers who came into the team recently are used to Spring MVC and require several weeks before getting productive with it.

We've had a few discussions on whether we should look for alternatives to Struts 1.3. Our web GUI will soon have a lot of new features going into it and I'm not sure whether it is worth the effort to start from scratch with a new web framework. From what I have gathered by talking to a few experienced web developers (outside my current organization) and from my own research on the Net, Struts 1.3 is a stable, mature and fairly popular (the Apache Struts page claims that it is the most popular web framework, but I take it with a pinch of salt).

What are your opinions?

Answer 1

What are your opinions?

Our opinions are irrelevant. When you ask a question like that on SO, without providing details about what your situation is, what kind of problems you are having (besides new people not knowing it), what your future needs are that you are considering alternatives to it etc, then people have a tendency to respond with their favorite framework, be it Spring, Wicket, JSF, Stripes, GWT etc which at this point becomes irrelevant to you.

What are your needs? Does Struts fulfill them or not?

If Struts works and you have a lot of experience with it, then why throw it away and change to something else? Because new hires don't know it and must spend a few weeks learning it? How are they supposed to learn it without investing some time? By osmosis? If you are worried about that time spend then only hire people who already know Struts instead of training them on the job.

If you have to change framework (because you reached its limit) then you already have some expertize with Spring MVC since the new developers know that, so Spring could be a good choice.

Or you could follow the logical path of migration (or at least it seems logical) and switch to Struts 2 . But Struts 1 and 2 are very different, so you still need to learn something new and invest time in it, but at least there are a lot more resources comparing Struts 1 to Struts 2 than Struts 1 to JSF for example.

OK... enough rambling... my personal opinion would be to go for Spring as a fist choice then Struts 2. I can't recommend others since I didn't do JSF, Wicket etc.

So basically, it resumes in finding out what the features of each framework are and choose the best for you needs .