I'm beginning to learn Struts 2, and am wondering:
Which is the most popular IDE for Struts 2?
I've looked at a few of them (netbeans, idea, eclipse) and only idea seems to treat Struts as a first class citizen. But the community version of idea doesn't have this capability.
The others have third party plugins to support it but it doesn't sound like its really 'built in'. I find this strange, given that struts is the most popular java framework.
Any hints appreciated
I use eclipse, but without any real plugin support.
Editing the struts xml files is a bit of a pain, but the xml valiator in Eclipse and eclipse's support for application servers and containers is pretty easy to deal with.
I've used Eclipse & MyEclipse.
MyEclipse was slightly more tailored to developing STRUTS webapps because you could start a Tomcat instance within it, and edit JSPs for real time changes. Not that you couldn't do this in Eclipse without setup. MyEclipse also had a graphical representation of the struts-config, but it wasn't really useful for large setups.
Most of my JSPs & config files were editted in TextPad...
I find this strange, given that Struts is the most popular Java framework.
Even if that's true, things are ephemeral in the presentation layer landscape and it might change in the future. On top of that, developing and maintaining IDE support for a non standard framework is not that light and may not be worth the effort, especially for open source initiatives. This might be an explanation.
That said, a good idea would be actually to avoid the XML configuration hell and to prefer a convention over configuration approach. The Codebehind Plugin can help achieving this. Another option would be to throw Struts 2 away and to switch to the Stripes Framework >:) But this is another story.
Eclipse with Struts 2 Plugin, this article provides details information about it Struts-2-Eclipse-plugin