Struts Internals

How does Struts work? The general idea: each web page leads to certain other pages, depending on user input and the state of the application. The Struts configuration maps URLs to "action" classes and a set of "forwards". A Struts action is a controller which decides which forward (associated with an URL) to use next. That's pretty much it...

Voila!

Remarks: In a finite state machine the controller receives an event, and, depending on the current state and the event, determines the next state. In Struts the event (URL request) triggers the controller, which actually has no knowledge about the current state - this knowledge is implied. The configuration needs to take care of that be defining forwards for a specific state.