Struts 2 issue

A dire emergency drove me to work on some substantial changes in in session handling and implementation of some security mechanisms.  While working on this, it became apparent that struts was not calling the execute method on some actions.  There was a good amount of logging added and not a single line was getting output.

For a brief moment, I thought I would have to immediately upgrade - it must have been a struts 2 bug. This may be the case but it was worked around.  Unfortunately, I did not have time to fully debug into struts to determine the true root cause.  The items that in some combination got things working again included:

1. Implement Action interface - we had implementations of the execute method with the correct signature but not as part of the Action interface.
2. Replace use of the old/deprecated filter with the use of the newer filter org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.ng.filter.StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter
3. Wrap some code in try/catch and do some defensive coding to prevent null reference access
4. Use some API calls in a more consistent fashion so that sessions are created under more controlled circumstances.

I would love to go back and debug into the roof issue here but there is never time - part of the organizational culture.  As much as I am annoyed by the person/people responsible for instigating our issue, it has put security back into the light again (for now).  Security is not a static item and the cost of treating it otherwise is high in many ways ($, time, respect, etc).