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Why is ActionForm a base class rather than an interface?
Struts Questions and Answers
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41. Why is ActionForm a base class rather than an interface?
The MVC design pattern is very simple to understand but much more difficult to live with. You just need this little bit of Business Logic in the View logic or you need just that little bit of View logic in the Business tier and pretty soon you have a real mess.
Making ActionForm a class takes advantage of the single inheritance restriction of Java to it makes it more difficult for people to do things that they should not do.
ActionForms implemented as interfaces encourage making the property types match the underlying business tier instead of Strings, which violates one of the primary purposes for ActionForms in the first place (the ability to reproduce invalid input, which is a fundamental user expectation). ActionForms as an interface would also encourage using existing DAO objects as ActionForms by adding ‘implements ActionForm’ to the class. This violates the MVC design pattern goal of separation of the view and business logic.
Since the goal of struts is to enforce this separation, it just makes more sense for Struts to own the ActionForm.
DynaActionForms relieve developers of maintaining simple ActionForms. For near zero maintenance, try Niall Pemberton's LazyActionForm
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