I've been involved with servlet and JSP technology since around 1998.
It started out that I needed a way to build some web applications for
several projects, and liked Java a lot better than the alternatives.
I also liked theprice tag of open source software, and started using
Apache JServ -- later , getting involved in the project (like many
people, I was whining about the twelve months it took to get from version
0.9 to version 1.0, and my son said "Dad, you know Java -- go help them
finish it!" -- so I did :-).
For quite a while, I was participating a lot the JSP-INTEREST and
SERVLET-INTEREST mailing lists,
especially the topic of good architectures for web applications.
I was disgusted with the hash that many beginners created when they used
(or abused) scriptlets in JSP pages, and built (for my former employer) a
pretty comprehensive framework that could considered ("Struts 0.01
without the custom tags").
It was proprietary code, but I was able to describe the concepts, and
there started to a feeling the lists that this "Model 2" thing was
pretty cool -- but there were no good examples to look at, so it was
mostly hand waving types of discussions.
Over the same time period, I got involved as an individual contributor in
the Java Community Process, and
joined the expert group that defined the servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 specs.
Sun was impressed enough to offer me a job as the technical lead the
team within Sun (currently five other individuals) that works
Tomcat -- the architecture
for Catalina, which is the servlet container part of Tomcat 4.0, is also
mine -- so I am in the really nice position of getting paid to work
open source software :-).
And, participate the expert groups for Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2.
And, speak at various conferences, including ApacheCon and JavaOne.
And, talk to groups within Sun about using Struts and JSP/servlet
technology.
And ... (there's some really interesting things being considered for the
future).
The original design of what came to Struts has been in my head for a
long time, since those interesting mailing list discussions, but the first
version of the actual code was written my laptop a Memorial Day
weekend vacation trip (end of May, 2000) to the Oregon coast -- in between
watching the surf and having the house shaken by a windstorm at night.
Since then, it has gathered attention and popularity as we approach our
first official release, and it delights me to see my "baby" grow up so
well :-).
Of course, it is no longer just me -- there have been incredible numbers
of good ideas from all over, and a peek at the TODO list for 1.1 says that
even more good stuff is coming in the future.
One motivation factor was
Jason
Hunter's article about the Problems with JSP.
Jason and I get along fine, even though we have different preferences
about presentation technologies.
Besides being the author of a very popular book about servlets, with a
second edition coming soon, Jason is also the representative for the
Apache Software Foundation the Executive Committee of the Java
Community Process.
Personally, I live in Portland, Oregon (even though my team at Sun is
mostly in Cupertino, CA -- staying here was part of the job deal :-).
I like to support Oregon sports teams (Oregon State Beavers, Oregon Ducks,
Portland Trailblazers) and work cool software.
I figured out I was getting pretty old when I realized that 2000 was the
25th year I had been paid to work in some aspect of software development
:-).
I've got a son who is a full-time software developer (primarily in PHP so
far, but I'm going to corrupt him with Java eventually :-), and a daughter
in college.
I'll happily let the other committers speak for themselves.
I'm currently a student of computer science at Drexel University in
Philadelphia, PA.
I've been working at HP Middleware, formerly Bluestone Software for 3
years programming in Java and recently J2EE technologies.
I'm a full time worker from September until April and a student and part
time worker from April until August.
In my spare time I've been known to run monkey-knife fights in a shady
south philly warehouse.
Err...
I mean... nothing.
My primary interest in Struts is to put it to work writing lots of
real-life Web applications:-)
To do that effectively means having good documentation and code samples at
my fingertips, so that's been my focus with the Struts product so far.
I've been writing software for hire since 1984, but only recently jumped
the Java bandwagon.
My initial interest was with electronic publishing, and started by
converting my various print projects to electronic media.
The "Information Superhighway" was still the private stomping ground of
Universities and government agencies then.
The rest of us had to make do with diskettes and bulletin boards.
Between 1985 and 1994, I created and marketed several software products
for publishing disk, the most popular being "Dart" and "Iris".
In 1992, Dart was awarded the Digital Quill for software excellence,
featured in PC Magazine (February 1992), and bundled with McGraw Hill's
bookset,"Paperless Publishing" by Colin Hayes (McGraw Hill 1994).
Dart won a second Digital Quill in 1993.
Several titles that used Iris for a publishing system have also won awards
and been widely distributed, including "Hermitville USA."
I was also fortunate to find kindred souls CompuServe and America
Online, who helped me pioneer resources areas there in 1993 and 1994 for
the nascent electronic publishing industry.
I finally cut loose the Internet in 1995, launching Epub News, an
electronic newspage about electronic publishing. After taking several
private contracts, I opened the Husted dot Com Website (www.husted.com)
in 1996.
I've drifted away from electronic books, but have noticed that several
products are now making their way into the consumer mainstream -- as
usual, I was twenty minutes into the future:-)
My favorite all-time project is the Hitchhikers Guide to Science Fiction.
This was one of my earliest hypertext projects (it started as a print-book
idea), and I had a lot of fun bringing it forward onto the Web.
(Now, if I only had time to bring it current and dress it up!)
My favorite all-time client is WXXI Public Broadcasting Council, where
I've served as the station's Webmaster.
WXXI provides public broadcasting services for television and radio, and
we are working to do the same online.
Along with providing companion Web sites for every WXXI production, we
stream both our AM and FM signals, in both Real and QuickTime, with online
archives in the works.
It's a long journey, but we've taken the first steps.
I'm responsible for most of the regular updates to the site, and much of
the overall layout and design.
We're grateful to have won the PBS award for best Web site in our market
for two years running.
Our most ambitious projects at WXXI have been Spring Marketplace 2000 and
the NY Election Finder.
For Spring Marketplace, we put our annual auction fully online for
simultaneous telephone and Website bidding.
NY Election, we offered not only the usual election-finder application,
but collected voter registration records from around the state, so
people could also check their registration status and polling place.
I developed the Web-enabled database applications for both projects.
Currently, I'm expanding the WXXI online auction software into a complete
package for hosting online auctions as fund-raisers; this is to an
open-source project called Gavel, and, of course, is based Struts.
As a dreamer / researcher I have thought a lot about a framework like
Struts.
But, as a lazy developer I have first checked what already exists, and I
have found Struts.
Struts goals fulfilled nearly all I needed for my (now old) portal
project, except the capability to reuse and assemble easily pieces of
pages or components.
So, I have proposed the Components framework.
This framework can seen as a superset of the Templates tag library
contributed by David Geary, and contains lot of interesting features.
From a professional point of view, I have a Ph.D. in computer science.
I have worked for 3 years in the R&D department of a worldwide company
developing Internet banking solutions.
I am now a researcher at a university, and work European research
projects.
My main research interest is WWW, Distributed Systems and Object Oriented
Design.
When developing code, I always try to first propose reusable pieces of
code.
Currently, I'm a Principal Software Engineer at Tumbleweed Communications,
working the Messaging Management System.
Early last year (2000), I was working the architecture for a new web-
based administration system for the product, and headed in the direction
of servlets and JSP.
I joined the JSP-INTEREST and SERVLET-INTEREST mailing lists to see what
was going in those respective areas.
Before too long, some interesting discussions started up around the topic
of Model 2 architectures.
Model 2 sounded like the right way to go about things, and I followed
those discussions closely.
I was, however, still looking for a "leg up" - something to give me that
core which to build.
Then, in May, I saw a post to JSP-INTEREST from Craig McClanahan entitled
something like "New Jakarta-Struts Subproject", and describing Struts, and
his vision for it.
I hopped right over to the Jakarta web site and signed up for the mailing
list.
Before long, I realized this was exactly what I had been looking for.
Now, a year or so later, we have a team of people, which I am the
technical lead, just finishing up our web-based administration system as
Struts reaches its 1.0 release.
And I am still firmly convinced that I made the right decision in going
with Struts in the first place.
Like anyone else, my first postings to the struts-user list were questions
to help me understand how to do things, and why Struts is the way it is.
Over time, reading the lists and also the source code, and working my
own fairly large web application, I came to the point where I could answer
questions too.
Now, I'm glad to able to give something back to the Struts community by
helping others understand, and also by contributing ideas and code to help
make Struts even better than it already is.
As I worked web based projects I started looking for something
that would really help save time during development.
I ran across Struts in the Summer of 2000 and decided it was a good
solution for web development.
As I used Struts it really helped to remove a lot of the repetitive work,
but validation still seemed very repetitive.
I had an idea to create validation rules in an xml file and have them
easily integrated with Struts.
It started out simple and continued to develop over time.
The validation project was eventually incorporated into Struts and the
core was moved to Jakarta Commons.
I'm happy to see Struts continue to grow and develop.
I currently am employed at Forbes.com.
I occasionally get to do some internal projects using Struts.
The last interesting project was a publishing system using Message Driven
EJBs in JBoss and Struts was used to display the status of each publishing
process.
I have gone from Unix -to- Windows -to- Unix based development about ever
6 years now. When moving to Windows I was amazed at how primitive the OS
was compared to Unix. While developing for Win32 I had the pleasure of
discovering Delphi and developed many GUI/databases, telephony,
Internet enabled applications. I remain impressed with its design.
Delphi, always enabled development of a simple elegant solution,
much like the language itself. I was convinced after 10 years of
development with C/C++ that it was a kinder gentler language.
Then in July 2000 I decided to move into Java, and Web development.
This is after using the Internet since 1985 and occasionally teaching
classes about it. I was hired as a consultant to take over a JSP based
application. I realized it had been written with the equivalent of
"goto's"(Model 1) and had to be redesigned.
I searched for a better way to design the code and by late August I had
found Struts. It is also a simple elegant solution.
To date I have mainly served to pitch in with odds and ends.
I continue to amazed at the Struts committers' generous contributions of time,
insight, and good will. I feel fortunate to part of the struts team.
I, like many others, discovered Struts when contemplating writing my own
MVC Java framework for the web.
Struts had everything I needed and more so I scrapped plans for my own and
joined the mailing lists.
After playing with it for several months I started submitting
documentation and a few source patches.
I'm excited about helping Struts evolve and am continually amazed by the
framework and the community surrounding it.
James has been so busy answering users questions and adding test cases that
he hasn't taken the time to brag about himself. I thought that I would add a place
marker for him until and if he does decide to --blow his own horn-- ! -Rob :-D !
I discovered Struts somewhat by accident. In 2001 I began writing a
book for SAMS on JSP web development (MySQL and JSP Web Development),
and as part of it, I decided to write a chapter on Struts in the
advanced section. In the process of learning enough about Struts to
write about it, I realized that it could simplify some of the projects
that I was working on for clients.
After a half a year of working with Struts, I was asked by SAMS to write
another book, this time concentrating on Struts specifically. That book,
co-authored with a former co-worker named Kevin Bedell, became Struts
Kick Start.
In the process of writing that book, I began to realize that there were
things I could do to contribute to Struts beyond writing about it. One
thing in particular was to clean up and add some functionality to the
Commons Validator project, which eventually led to me release-managing
(with a lot of help!) the Commons Validator 1.0 release.
More generally, I've been a software developer for over 22 years, starting
with work as a Research Specialist at the MIT AI Lab. I spent nearly a
decade working in LISP, before moving on to C/Unix, a stint managing the
Web Site for the Christian Science Monitor, and finally Java based
e-Commerce development, which has kept me busy for the last five years.
In addition to the two books mentioned above, I also write for a number of
publications, including WIRED and the aforementioned Christian Science
Monitor. You can get a look at my portfolio
here
