Struts is a popular open source framework from Apache Software Foundation to build web applications that integrate with standard technologies such as Servlets, Java Beans and Java Server pages.

Struts offers many benefits to the web application developer,including the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design patterns (best practice) in web applications.

The Model-View-Controller paradigm applied to web applications lets you separately display code (for example, HTML and tag libraries) from flow control logic (action classes) from the data model to be displayed and updated by the application.

Struts offers a set of tag libraries to support the faster development of the different layers of the web application.

The basic idea of the MVC architecture is to divide the application into three layers: Model that represents the data layer, a view layer that represents the data processed by the model component; and a Controller component that is responsible for interaction between the model and the controller.

So when we say Struts is an MVC framework for web based applications, we actually mean that it facilitates the rapid development of applications by providing a Controller that helps interaction between the model and the view so that an application developer has not to worry about how to make view and the model independent of each other and yet exist in coordination.

Struts is basically a Controller. It depends on other things for the model and the view. It can communicate with Hibernate, Enterprise Java Beans or any other java components for the model. JSP/Servlets are used for the view which use html front end internally. Struts provides several tag libraries to support the rapid development for the view layer.