My ApacheCon Core Europe 2015 Talk: Struts 2 and AngularJS

In October 2015 I spoke at ApacheCon: Core Europe in Budapest, the Apache Software Foundation’s own conference. The talk showed how to build Java web applications with Apache Struts 2 on the server and AngularJS in the browser, and what the upcoming Struts 2.5 release would change.

The slides are on SlideShare.:

My slides to this talk are now also available at slideshare.

What the talk covered

• Changes in the upcoming Struts 2.5 release
• A quick start with Struts 2 and AngularJS
• RESTful actions with the Struts 2 REST plugin
• Handling exceptions in a single-page application
• The new bean validation plugin
• Multi-language support

The demo application from the live part is in the Apache Struts examples repository: rest-angular on GitHub.

Update, 2026

Struts 2.5 has long been superseded by Struts 7, and AngularJS reached its end of life in 2021. The idea behind the talk still holds: Struts delivers JSON, the browser renders it. I’ve updated the written tutorial on Struts 2 and AngularJS with what changed since then.

A few years later I gave a different kind of talk, about how Apache projects govern themselves: The Apache Way of Open Source at re:publica 2018.