Although Struts is a well documented, mature and popular framework for building front ends to Java applications, it is facing new challenges from newer "light weight" MVC frameworks such as Spring MVC, Stripes and Tapestry. The new XForms standards and frameworks may also be another option to building complex web Form validations with Struts in the future.
The WebWork framework spun off from Apache Struts several years ago, aiming to offer enhancements and refinements while retaining the same general architecture of the original Struts framework. However, it was announced in December 2005 that Struts would re-merge with WebWork. WebWork 2.2 has been adopted as Apache Struts 2, which reached its first full release in February 2007.
Sun recently brought out a new addition to the Java platform, called JavaServer Faces (JSF). Aside from the original framework, the Apache Struts project also offers a JSF-based framework called Shale.
Other MVC frameworks that are not J2EE based include Ruby on Rails, WebObjects, Django, Catalyst, TurboGears, CakePHP, Symfony (for PHP), Zend, Achievo ATK, and CodeIgniter (for PHP). Struts4php is a version of the Struts framework for the PHP web scripting language [1]. Girders is a port of the Struts framework in C# for Microsoft .NET [2].
