Best practices Struts for tech. proj. leads

Question

baseBeans engineering won best training by readers of JDJ and published the first book on Struts called FastTrack to Struts.
Upcoming class is live in NYC, on 5/2 from 7:30 AM to 1:00PM. We will cover db driven web site development, process, validation, tiles, multi row, J2EE security, DAO, development process, SQL tuning, etc.
We will teach a project tech lead methods that will increase the productivity of his team and review best practices, so that they can benchmark their environment.
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·     We preach and teach simple.
·     We use a very fast DAO DB Layer – with DAO side data cache
·     We use JSTL
·     We use a list backed Bean w/ DAO helper design for access to any native source and to switch out DAO.
·     We use J2EE security, container managed declarative authorization and authentication. (no code, works on any app. server).
·     Struts based Content Management System. A Struts menu entry like this:
<Item name="About_Contacts"      title="About/Contacts"
toolTip="About Us and Contact Info" page="/do/cmsPg?content=ABOUT" />
passes to the action the parm of “about” which the DAO populates.
You can peak at the source code at sourceforge.net/projects/basicportal or go to our site baseBeans.net. (16,000 downloads since Oct. 2002)
Note that the baseBeans.net is using the Content Management System (SQL based) that we train on. (our own dog food)
Note: We always offer money back on our public classes.
Vic Cekvenich
Project Recovery Specialist
[email protected]
800-314-3295
<a href =”baseBeans.net”>Struts Training</a>
ps:
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Answer 1

Hi,
We use only Stateful release modes for application modules, defined in the action mappings in struts-config.xml exactly the same way as in your example. Stateful mode releases the module instance back to the pool and it can be reused by other sessions as well. However, all the code that uses the app modules and view objects, etc, must be written with the assumption that the module or the view object the code is operating on can be a different instance from the one in the previous request in the same session.
The concept of BC4J is that this recycling of modules should be transparent for the users of the app modules, but this is not exactly the case. Some things are not passivated in the am's snapshots and are not activated in case of recycling, for example, custom view object properties or entries in the userData map (or at least were not in 9.0.5, I doubt this is changed in 10.1.2.) These are things that you have to manually passivate and activate if you use them to store some information that is relevant to a particular user session.
All chances are that these strange things that you experience only occur in sessions that use recycled application modules, that is, there was passivation and subsequent activation of vo and am states. I have found it useful as a minimum to test the application with only 1 application module in the pool and at least 2 user sessions, constantly recycling this one am instance. Many of the problems that will surface in a real application usage only when there is a high load can be experienced in this artificial setup.