Many developers get confused when they
learn about the ActionForm class. Although it can
hold state for an application , the state that
it holds should be limited and constructed to the
user input that is received from the client, and
the ActionForm should hold it only until it can
be validated and transferred to the business tier.
Business objects can be persisted and should
contain the browser logic for an application. They
also should be reusable. This set of criteria does
not match up well when compared against ActionForms
For one thing, the ActionForm class servlet is
tied to the struts framework and explicitly to a web
container, as it imports javax.servlet package.
It would be very difficult to post ActionForm
classes to a different type framework, such as a swing
application.
ActionForm are designed exclusively to capture the
HTML data from a client, allows presentation, validation
to occur, and provide a transport data from the tier
forward to the views. Apart from these users, you should
keep the ActionForms separate from your business
components.
---> These lines are from
"Programming Jakarta Struts"
