Spring MVC vs Struts

Gerard Davison's Weblog: First looks, Spring MVC vs Struts

In most places, the Spring framework doesn't reinvent working technologies. In the area of presentation logic, though, Spring introduces a simple model-view-controller framework called MVC Web that has many competing architectures, like Struts and Java Server Faces (JSF). Take solace, though. You don't have to use MVC Web to use Spring. But if you decide to do so, you will find a few advantages:

-MVC Web is based on interfaces rather than inheritance. As we discussed in Chapter 3, interfaces often give better flexibility and looser coupling than inheritance-based designs.

-MVC Web does not dictate your choice of view. Other frameworks tend to provide better support for favored view technologies, such as Velocity (proprietary) and Struts (JSP). For example, Struts exposes the model via request attributes. As a result, you need to build a bridge servlet to use a technology such as Velocity that doesn't understand the Servlet API. Spring exposes the model through a generic map, so it can work with any view technology.

-MVC Web provides consistent configuration across all aspects of a Spring application. It uses the same inversion-of-control paradigm that the other frameworks use.

-MVC Web makes testing easier. Since you don't have to extend another class (like Action or ActionForm in Struts), you can easily mock the request and response.


Karl Baum opened this thread.