Question

This concerns the state of Struts2 framework tooling, although currently I use no IDE plug-in, preferring to create projects with maven from scratch. At one time I did use the Netbeans Struts2 plugin but stopped when support lapsed for a time between IDE releases.

It is important to know the state of current tooling and so ask:

What features are offered by the Struts2 IDE framework plugin for your IDE(s)?

Are there any design issues with the plugin? (flaws such as wanting to include old or outdated libraries)

Answer 1

This answer applies to the the Netbeans plugin found here: http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/39218 (at time of writing the last updated was : 2011-12-17)

Features

• When Starting a new project. File > New Project > Web Application
  You now have the option of adding struts2 support, which can product a struts2 demo project.
• Not tested, but should assist in validation.xml files.

Issues and Limitations

• There is no support to create sources in a Maven Web application.
• If you use annotations for validation the plug-in does not help.
• There is no more support in struts.xml than provided by the IDE naturally. I would have really liked to see property suggestions at the very least, and it would have been very nice to see a list of name values when in a struts.xml constant tag. The IDE does do auto completion in applicationContext.xml where it expects a class, this would be really helpful in struts.xml for the class attribute of the action tag (among other places).
• There is an annoying issue of the plug-in creating struts.xml files with a special icon but when creating new xml documents this icon does not apply (should be applied on the basis of the dtd) so you need to copy and paste the file to get the icon and then change the contents.
• It only provides struts2 version 2.0.14 or 2.2.3

Over all I do not recommend this plug-in over a standard Maven Project and manually adding the dependencies.