News

Apache Struts 1 Reaches End of Life

• By John K. Waters
• April 8, 2013

Apache Struts 1.x, the original version of the Java EE Web application development framework, has reached the "end of life," according to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), and is no longer officially supported.

The Apache Struts Project Management Committee made the announcement in a statement posted online. The committee "is not aware of any urgent issues posing the immediate need to eliminate Struts 1 usage," the announcement stated. "However, the project's [end of life] status signifies that security and bug fixes will no longer be provided effective immediately."

The committee urged developers to use Struts 2 for any new projects. In fact, the ASF has been focused on Struts 2 for years. The last Struts 1.x release was version 1.3.0, announced in December 2008.

"While any action-based Java Web framework is a potential candidate to re-use Struts 1 architectural experience or migrate existing Struts-1-based applications," the committee wrote, "users are highly advised to investigate Struts 2 as a successor framework."

Originally known as WebWork 2, Struts 2 is the result of the combined efforts of the Struts and WebWork communities. WebWork was a Java-based Web app framework developed by a company called OpenSymphony. The first version of Struts 2 was released in 2007. The framework is designed to be simpler to use, and "closer to how struts was always meant to be," the ASF says on its Web site. The Struts community continues to put a lot of energy into Struts 2; to date there have been an estimated 23 releases of the framework.

Created in 2000 by former Sun Microsystems programmer Craig McClanahan, who later released it to the open source community, the Struts 1.x framework was designed to promote the use of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, which separates the business logic (model) from the page design code (view) and the navigational code (controller). At one point, it was the de-facto standard for Java-based Web app development. But JavaServer Faces (JSF), a Java spec for building component-based Web applications, eventually became more popular.

Oracle used Struts in early version of its JDeveloper IDE, but later developed its Application Development Framework (ADF) to be a model-view-controller alternative to Struts.