Difference between struts and springs

Question: Difference between Strust and Springs

Answer:Difference between struts and springs could be analysed from various facets.

(1) Purpose of each framework.
(2) Various feature offerings at framework level.
(3) The design & stuff.

Firstly, Struts is a sophisticated framework offering the easy 2 develop, structured view/presentation layer of the MVC applications. Advanced, robust and scalable view framework underpinning reuse and seperation of concerns to certain extent. Springs is a Lightweight Inversion of Control and Aspect Oriented Container Framework. Every work in the last sentence carry the true purpose of the Spring framework. It is just not a framework to integrate / plug in at the presentation layer. It is much more to that. It is adaptible and easy to run light weight applications, it provides a framework to integrate OR mapping, JDBC etc., Infact Struts can be used as the presentation tier in Spring.

Secondly, Struts features strictly associate with presentation stuff. It offers Tiles to bring in reuse at presentation level. It offers Modules allowing the application presentation to segregate into various modules giving more modularity there by allowing each module to have its own Custom/Default Request Processor. Spring provides Aspect Oriented programming, it also solves the seperation of concerns at a much bigger level. It allows the programmer to add the features (transactions, security, database connectivity components, logging components) etc., at the declaration level. Spring framework takes the responsibility of supplying the input parameters required for the method contracts at runtime reducing the coupling between various modules by a method called dependency injection / Inversion of Control.

Thirdly, Struts is developed with a Front Controller and dispatcher pattern. Where in all the requests go to the ActionServlet thereby routed to the module specific Request Processor which then loads the associated Form Beans, perform validations and then handovers the control to the appropriate Action class with the help of the action mapping specified in Struts-config.xml file. On the other hand, spring does not route the request in a specific way like this, rather it allows to you to design in your own way however in allowing to exploit the power of framework, it allows you to use the Aspect Oriented Programming and Inversion of Control in a great way with great deal of declarative programming with the XML. Commons framework can be integrated to leverage the validation in spring framework too. Morethan this, it provides all features like JDBC connectivity, OR Mapping etc., just to develop & run your applications on the top of this.


Another differences:
1. Struts is a web framework only, Struts can be compare with the SpringMVC. And SpringMVC is subset of the Spring framework. So we can say that Sturts can be seen as the subset of the spring framework in functionality point of view.
2. What Action class do in struts, Controller does in Spring. And action in Struts is a Abstract class but Controller in Spring is an interface, This is very good advantage of the spring.
3. Spring don�t have any action from, it bind the http form values directly into pojo. Instead of initializing the form bean spring directly initialize the domain object.
4. ActionForward in struts is replace with the ModelAndView in Spring. Model component contain the business object to be displayed via view component.
5. Unlike Struts Spring don�t provide any separate tag library.



More talk:
1.Struts implement MVC Design Patten where as Spring implements IOC Design Pattren and addreses AOP Cross cutting concerns.
2.Struts is heavy weight where as Spring is light weight framework.
3.Struts is tightly coupled Spring is loosely coupled.



Struts will be Generally used as a Front End Frame work.
Spring has spring webFlow for the same purpose, which is part of spring Framework.

The other major advatages of spring Framework is it handles

- Transaction management
- support for Messaging
- support and Integration with Other Frame works.
(Eg: Hibernate, Struts, Tapestry.. etc)

Struts Framework have some advantages
-Excellent support for Tag Library, which has wide industry acceptance.
-Easy to integare with other client side technologies.

It really a subjective matter, what for you want to use them.
both can be combindly used, to take best out of them,
or spring can alone can be used.




whenever develop applicatoion in two ways:
1.Programming through interface
2.Programming through class
Struts drawbacks:

1.better way is Programming through interfaces so that struts not support that(i.e all are predifined class.. Action,DiaspatchAction,SwitchAction)
2.This framework is tightcoupling.it is not separated layerwised
3.It is not Suuport to DependencyInjection
4.We have to hard code to use
applications like hibernate, jdbc, etc.

SPRING:
overcome the above problems Spring will be introduced
Spring Application develop through Interface
It suport DI.
It is layerwise designed.
It is loosecoupling
Spring suport MVC and Other MVC
Spring Application allways flow DesginPatterns
Spring support to POJO'S AND POJI(i.e it is not api dependent)
spring without hard coding in application as spring supports
classes hibernate, jdbc, and many more. This is very little
to say about spring. There are many features to be known.