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Before you start
This tutorial guides you through the process of installing and configuring the Struts Validator component. I'll also show you how to use the Validator -- at least at a simple level -- and to ensure that it's working with your particular Struts configuration. And, if you've never used Struts (and are brave enough to keep working through this tutorial nonetheless), you'll want to review the Appendix, which offers a crash course on Struts installation.
After completing this tutorial, you'll have the Validator set up and running, and you should be comfortable configuring Validator for use in your ActionForms. Additionally, you will have seen some very simple uses of the Validator, giving you a head start on your Struts/Validator application programming.
Who should take this tutorial?
This tutorial is written for Web developers who have some familiarity with Java technology, the Tomcat servlet engine, and the Struts application framework.
If you're using a servlet engine other than Tomcat, you will need to be comfortable with your servlet engine's setup and configuration; this tutorial assumes you're using Tomcat, and no extra detail is provided for non-Tomcat configurations. Check the Struts documentation for more information on installing Struts on servlet containers other than Tomcat (there's a link to the specific section of the documentation in Resources).
This tutorial deals specifically with configuring Struts, so you'll need to be at least passingly familiar with XML documents. You should also have administrative access to the machine you have Struts set up on; we'll be adding some JAR files and changing the core Struts setup to get the Validator up and running. You also might want to brush up on declarative programming (again, see Resources if declarative programming is new to you).
To take this tutorial, you will need a machine -- or ISP -- that has a servlet engine, such as Apache Tomcat, installed. I highly recommend that you run through this tutorial either locally, on a development machine, or on a non-production ISP account. In other words, don't try this out on a machine serving thousands of users, as you're going to have to make changes to your servlet container and you may have to restart that container several times.
Although neither is required for this tutorial, I'm using version 5.0 of the Java platform on Mac OS X. Some of the warnings and output captures you'll see in this tutorial reflect that. Additionally, I'm using Tomcat 5.5.9, which requires version 5.0 of the Java platform (unless you download a special bit of code that allows it to work with earlier JVMs). There is no special version of the Java platform or Tomcat required for this tutorial, although I strongly urge you to use at least version 5.0.
You also need a good text editor (or XML and Java editor, if you prefer), preferably one where you can have several windows open at once. There are a lot of files to configure, and using vi with a terminal window is going to get a little old. (That said, I'm using TextEdit on Mac OS X, so you don't need anything too fancy either.)
Finally, make sure you've downloaded the Struts engine and sample application (see the Appendix). I'll use the sample application to avoid going into too much detail about setting up Struts forms, which isn't the point of this tutorial.
There are a few more libraries that are required for the Validator itself to run, but we'll discuss these in Installing the Validator framework.
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