The last three major packages are action, config, and form. These should be recognizable to anyone who has worked with STRUTS before. STRUTS is an Apache project that provides a MVC (Model View Controller) framework for web applications using Servlets and JSPs. It is used for the web based administration interface of GeoServer. If you are interested in working with the web admin interface we recommend reading up on STRUTS, and then diving into the Javadocs of GeoServer - we closely followed the recommended ways of implementing STRUTS, so talking extensively about the design here would just replicate past design discussions of STRUTS.

A few things bear mentioning, however. One thing to note is that our STRUTS implementation only makes use of DTO objects, it does not actually control the GeoServer application itself, it simply sends updated DTO objects. This allows us to keep a clear separation between the application and the configuration. This was a design goal to make sure that GeoServer in no way depends on the web admin interface, so people could work directly with the xml configuration files and be completely fine. It also opens the door to other configuration options. Indeed a great contribution would be an extension to the new uDig project to allow it to be used to configure GeoServer directly. It should also be noted that changing any configuration options in GeoServer should be made available in the xml files and the web admin tool. Thankfully there is a document entailing exactly how to do that: here.