Impala and Strecks

A few of you may about my involvement in another open source project, Strecks, which was a set of Java 5 specific extensions to Struts. Yes, remember Struts, the one that used to be so popular a few years ago. There are a few similarities between Impala and Strecks, but also a few differences, that I would like to comment on.

First, the similarities. Just like Strecks was an extension to Struts, Impala is an extension to Spring. I wrote Streck to address what I perceived to be limitations of Struts. These limitations of Struts are now fairly well understood. In a similar way, I wrote Impala to address shortcomings of Spring - in particular, the lack of first class support for modules.

Strecks allowed me to write web applications with Struts the way I believed they should be written. The changes I made with Impala have allowed me to write Spring applications in the way that I would like to write them. Some of the real headaches that came with attempting to scale Spring applications, attempting to build in sophisticated configuration options, have just gone away.

Now to the differences. The timing of Strecks was unfortunate. Just as I was in the reasonably advanced early stages of development, an announcement was made that Struts was to merge with Webwork, with future Struts 2 development using the Webwork code base. That was the death knell to Struts as we knew it. I believed at the time that Strecks was a genuine way forward for Struts, without having to throw away the code base and stick a finger at the huge Struts user community. However, once the decision had been made, any project based on old Struts had little chance of gaining any long term traction. I still took the project to a 1.0 final release, but there seemed little point in actively developing the project from then onwards, unless it served my own needs directly. Since then, I haven't been working on Struts projects more than intermittently, so such a need hasn't arisen in any real sense. That being said, it's still getting 100 to 200 downloads a month, so it hasn't disappeared completely off the map. Oddly, I am now spending a bit more time on a Struts-based project, so it might be a good opportunity to revive Strecks and put in a couple of features I had wanted to add. Also, I might focus on Strecks as a target for web framework integration with Impala.

In contrast to Struts, I don't think there is any chance that the Spring code base is going to be deprecated any time soon. It's an extremely healthy project, arguably more so than any other in the Java community. Secondly, internally, Spring is well architected. It has all the extension points I have needed for Impala to fit naturally into the existing design paradigm. I have never felt the need to correct Spring's faults. Struts, on the other hand, had flaws in its architecture that were not always easy to get around when implementing features in Strecks.

My hope is that the Spring community will share my view that Impala elegantly solves some of the real practical problems which come when developing large, complex Spring-based applications, delivering substantial productivity benefits at the same time. It has been a fascinating and enjoyable project to work on. It would be nice to see some of these benefits being shared more widely. But first I need to get the public release out!