Building with WebWork2

Sky-Tiger

Other Features not mentioned in detail


Action packaging
This allows you to jar up a set of Action classes and include the xwork.xml file as an include in the master xwork.xml file. You can also do the same for Velocity views, which, if used together will allow you to componentize your application for easier sharing of pieces of functionality.



UI Components and Custom components
Webwork allows you to create reusable, skinnable user interface components like a calendar date picker that so many weblogs seem to have these days.



Namespaces and Packages
You can bundle up configurations in xwork.xml into packages which can be used to extend other packages, gaining access to all actions, interceptors, etc. Add namespaces with the packaging and you can create action aliases with different classes giving you the ability to have RegisterAction.action in one namespace point to a different class in another namespace.

Sky-Tiger

Why do I like WebWork2?
You may remember me ranting about how great Maverick is a few months back on TSS. So how does WebWork2 compare you ask? It's very similar. Both are built with a lot of interfaces to help promote extensibility and decoupling. Both are easy to use and have a well designed code base. But the big difference is that WebWork has Interceptors and IoC. You can handle much of the pre and post processing in Interceptors instead of in Action hierarchies like I did in the Wafer weblog application using Maverick when I was trying to do authentication. What about Struts? Struts does have much of the functionality that WW2 has BUT it is not part of the base release. For many that may not be a big deal but when it comes time for company standards those add-ons most likely won't be allowed. Also, Struts has full abstract classes and few interfaces.

WebWork is a Model-2 MVC framework. How many other frameworks fit that bill? Here is a possible list of reasons why you might be interested in using WW2:

It's built with interfaces instead of concrete classes
You like some of the features not included in the "other" framework like IoC or Interceptors.
You are looking for an MVC that is not bound to the J2EE environment, making unit testing easier along with other tasks.
Many companies are moving from Struts to Webwork as their standard.
You drink Pepsi instead of Coke.


Conclusion
Building the Wafer weblog application was truly a dream with WebWork. Their use of interfaces and interceptors make it easy and flexible and make it difficult to not day dream of all the ways I could work with these new concepts. The community is big and strong with leaders one can be proud of. In my Maverick article I mentioned that if you are going to learn one framework maybe you should choose Struts over Maverick. This time, I would say choose WebWork.

justforregister

垃圾 bs