On September 30th, 2009, Apache released Struts 2.1.8 for general availability.  Though we couldn’t find much info on the differences between 2.1.6 and 2.1.8, here’s what Musachy Barroso said about “Why web developers should choose Struts 2″, in his interview on InfoQ.

“Struts 2 is probably the most loosely-coupled framework available. Out of the box, many features are usable with little or no customization and it is easy to learn. The same knowledge can then be applied to add plugins to override default behaviors. The loose coupling also allows business logic to be written with no knowledge of the existence of Struts. Despite this, Struts scales up really well and is currently powering some very high-traffic sites.”

We like the evolution of Struts, and wanted to do our part to help minimize the time between writing Struts code & seeing the changes, so with the release of JRebel 2.1, we are proud to present extended support for Struts 1.x & 2.x, with full support for reloading action mappings. Combined with JRebel’s previously released features (skipping redeploys by reloading changes to Java classes in the running application, and skipping builds by mapping the project workspace to the deployed WARs or EARs), JRebel is now an even more potent time-saving tool for Struts 1 and Struts 2 users.

See the screencast for a demonstration of coding with Struts 2 and JRebel:

If you’re not familiar with JRebel, catch up in under 3 mins with this screencast, which shows other JRebel features, including support for the Spring framework (or take a look at the feature list):

We’re glad to see the success of the Struts 2 framework, and happy to support the community.  Did you know that on average there are more than 2 million project downloads of Struts per month, since March of 2008?