Struts 2 Blank Archetype

The Struts 2 Blank Archetype ("blank-archetype") provides a minimal, but complete, Struts 2 application. It demonstrates some of the most basic Struts 2 concepts, including:

• XML-based configuration, demonstrates including additional config file
• Example actions
• Package-level resource bundle
• XML-based validation
• Unit-testing

Contents

Creating Our blank-archetype Project

We'll run the following command from our project's parent directory (this is shown using Unix-style commands).

$ mvn archetype:generate -B \
                         -DgroupId=tutorial \
                         -DartifactId=tutorial \
                         -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.struts \
                         -DarchetypeArtifactId=struts2-archetype-blank \
                         -DarchetypeVersion=2.1.6
$ ls
tutorial/
$ cd tutorial
$ ls
pom.xml         src/

Project Structure

The source code structure follows the normal Maven directory structure. Blank-archetype does not include all of these directories. Our project's structure looks like this:

Structure Difference From Non-Maven Projects

One big change for folks not used to the Maven structure is the separation of Java source code and resource files. For example, in a non-Maven project our directory structure might look like this:

It can take a little while to get used to, but ultimately it provides good separation of "types" of things, and becomes second-nature pretty quickly. Note that it's possible to use a non-Maven directory layout with Maven projects, but this can be challenging at some points.