The Struts base Action class has been modified with a new method called execute( ). This new method should be called instead of the perform( ) method. The main difference between the two is that the execute( ) method declares that it throws java.lang.Exception, whereas the earlier perform( ) method declared IOException and ServletException. This change was necessary to facilitate the new declarative exception-handling feature that was added to Struts 1.1.
The perform( ) method has been deprecated and should not be used.