In the MVC design pattern, application flow is mediated by a central Controller. The Controller delegates requests to an appropriate handler. The handlers are tied to a Model, and each handler acts as an adapter between the request and the Model. The Model represents, or encapsulates, an application's business logic or state. Control is usually then forwarded back through the Controller to the appropriate View. The forwarding can be determined by consulting a set of mappings, usually loaded from a database or configuration file. This provides a loose coupling between the View and Model, which can make an application significantly easier to create and maintain.

Controller--Servlet controller which supplied by Struts itself; View --- what you can see on the screen, a JSP page and presentation components; Model --- System state and a business logic JavaBeans.

Action, ActionForm, ActionServlet, ActionMapping, ActionForward are basic classes of Struts.

ApplicationResources.properties
struts-config.xml
These two files are used to bridge the gap between the Controller and the Model.

The < html:javascript > tag to allow front-end validation based on the xml in validation.xml. For example the code: < html:javascript formName=logonForm dynamicJavascript=true staticJavascript=true / > generates the client side java script for the form logonForm as defined in the validation.xml file. The < html:javascript > when added in the jsp file generates the client site validation script.

According to the Servlet specification, resources (e.g. JSP files) stored under WEB-INF are protected and cannot be accessed directly by the browsers. One design idiom for Struts 1.0 is to put all the JSP files under WEB-INF and front them by Actions so that clients cannot illegally access the JSPs.
With the introduction of sub-application prefixes in Struts 1.1, mapping resources under WEB-INF gets complicated. Extra configuration steps utilizing the pagePattern and forwardPattern attributes of the element in struts-config.xml is required to inform Struts to construct the paths correctly. More specifically, you need to set these attributes to the pattern "/WEB-INF/$A$P".