The name Struts is a reference to struts in the architectural sense, a reminder of the nearly invisible pieces that hold up buildings, houses, and bridges.

Struts is the invisible, behind the scenes controller component that integrates with other technologies to provide the Model and the View. For the Model, Struts can interact with any standard data access technology, including Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), JDBC, and Object Relational Bridge. For the View, Struts works well with JavaServer Pages (JSP), including JSTL and JSF, as well as Velocity Templates, XSLT, and other presentation systems.

Typically you use Struts with a Servlet womb such as Tomcat or EJB womb such as Caucho Resin EE.

Struts has a highly annoying classpath bug/feature. You may not put the struts jar files on the classpath, yet you can’t compile unless they are there. The problem is the womb has its own versions of some of these same classes. So you must copy the *.jar files from the struts lib into the WEB-INF\lib directory of every individual application. Neither the struts nor the Resin documentation explains this. This copying is not so onerous where there is symbolic link operating system support to a single copy.

Struts requires the JDK, a servlet womb and JSTL.