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spring-mvcstruts-1legacy

Modernizing Struts 1.x Application

I would like to modernize my Struts 1.x application. There are quite a number of articles which advocate migration of codes, instead of rewriting the entire system.

I would like to seek the advice of someone who has successfully modernize legacy applications.

My current system is using struts 1.x and JDBC prepared statements as the data access layer.

I am looking forward to improve the legacy application with the following objectives:

  1. Web Pages should be coded with Responsive Web Design in mind.
  2. Replace struts 1.x with Spring MVC

I am looking to breaking up the modernization into the following phases:

  1. Phase 1 - Change all jsp pages to HTML 5 and CSS 3
  2. Phase 2 - Change all DAO classes to Spring JDBC Template or Spring JPA and transactions managed by Spring
  3. Phase 3 - Ultimately, replace Struts 1.x Action Forms, Actions with Spring MVC

Before I start the changes, I would like to find out if it is possible for:

  1. Struts 1.x with HTML 5 and CSS 3? I am looking at replacing all struts 1.x html taglibs with HTML 5 and JSTL/EL.
  2. Running Struts 1.x with Spring 3/4? Is it possible to run non-spring managed pojo with Spring beans?

What should I take note of and how/what are the best practices to handle this modernization process? The code base is about 500k of HTML/JSP codes and 3 million Java codes.

Solution

    1. It's been a while since I last worked with Struts 1.x, but I see no problem replacing at least most of the Struts tags with JSTL/EL. You should be able to paint HTML5 with Struts 1.x JSPs. I remember working using little or no Struts tags, only JSTL/EL, but this was before HTML5.

    2. You can invoke Spring Context from any Struts ActionForm or, essentially any class within your webapp. You'll probably have to do it manually though and not with annotations, something like this:

      WebApplicationContext applicationContext = WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(getServletContext());

    With all this said, I can see you're intending to do a serious update of your app, therefore I must ask, are you positive about keeping Struts 1.x? If you want to ditch Struts tags, use Spring 3/4 and HTML 5, why not dispense with Struts entirely and migrate your app to Spring MVC? It's very easy to use, powerful and, needless to say, it integrates perfectly with the Spring components implementing your business logic, persistence, etc.

    Cheers.