Difference between Spring MVC and Struts MVC

Question

What is the major difference between the Spring MVC and Struts MVC?

Solution 1

The major difference between Spring MVC and Struts is: Spring MVC is loosely coupled framework whereas Struts is tightly coupled. For enterprise Application you need to build your application as loosely coupled as it would make your application more reusable and robust as well as distributed.

Solution 2

If you wanna compare Spring MVC with struts consider below benefit of Spring MVC over Struts.

1. Spring provides a very clean division between controllers, JavaBean models, and views.
2. Spring's MVC is very flexible. Unlike Struts, which forces your Action and Form objects into concrete inheritance (thus taking away your single shot at concrete inheritance in Java), Spring MVC is entirely based on interfaces. Furthermore, just about every part of the Spring MVC framework is configurable via plugging in your own interface. Of course we also provide convenience classes as an implementation option.
3. Spring, like WebWork, provides interceptors as well as controllers, making it easy to factor out behavior common to the handling of many requests.
4. Spring MVC is truly view-agnostic. You don't get pushed to use JSP if you don't want to; you can use Velocity, XLST or other view technologies. If you want to use a custom view mechanism - for example, your own templating language - you can easily implement the Spring View interface to integrate it.
5. Spring Controllers are configured via IoC like any other objects. This makes them easy to test, and beautifully integrated with other objects managed by Spring.
6. Spring MVC web tiers are typically easier to test than Struts web tiers, due to the avoidance of forced concrete inheritance and explicit dependence of controllers on the dispatcher servlet.
7. The web tier becomes a thin layer on top of a business object layer. This encourages good practice. Struts and other dedicated web frameworks leave you on your own in implementing your business objects; Spring provides an integrated framework for all tiers of your application

Solution 3

The main difference between struts & spring MVC is about the difference between Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) & Object oriented programming (OOP).

Spring makes application loosely coupled by using Dependency Injection.The core of the Spring Framework is the IoC container.

OOP can do everything that AOP does but different approach. In other word, AOP complements OOP by providing another way of thinking about program structure.

Practically, when you want to apply same changes for many files. It should be exhausted work with Struts to add same code for tons of files. Instead Spring write new changes somewhere else and inject to the files.

Some related terminologies of AOP is cross-cutting concerns, Aspect, Dependency Injection...

Solution 4

Spring's Web MVC framework is designed around a DispatcherServlet that dispatches requests to handlers, with configurable handler mappings, view resolution, locale and theme resolution as well as support for upload files. The default handler is a very simple Controller interface, just offering a ModelAndView handleRequest(request,response) method. This can already be used for application controllers, but you will prefer the included implementation hierarchy, consisting of, for example AbstractController, AbstractCommandController and SimpleFormController. Application controllers will typically be subclasses of those. Note that you can choose an appropriate base class: if you don't have a form, you don't need a form controller. This is a major difference to Struts

Solution 5

Spring MVC is deeply integreated in Spring, Struts MVC is not.

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Comments

[Buhake Sindi]

Which version of Struts do you want to compare with Spring MVC?

[Rafael Sanches]

If you're interested in Spring MVC, read my blog article blog.rafaelsanches.com/2012/02/02/spring-mvc-velocity-dcevm

[Krishna]

thank you for the inputs

[Faisal Naseer]

Dependency Injection

[Krishna]

Thank you for the information

[Aritz]

Could you provide examples for them of being loosely and tightly coupled?

[Chloe]

Can you use HAML with Spring MVC? Now that would seal the deal!

[Matt]

This sounds like a biased opinion. I'm sure there are benefits to struts over spring.

[frank]

struts 2 is not tightly coupled.