WebWork 2.1 was released about a month ago with very little press. With the release of 2.1.1, the 2.1.x product line is stable and solid. We encourage those using older versions (1.x and 2.0) to try out 2.1.1.

The full list of bug fixes and new features can be found in the release notes.

Now that the 2.x line is mature and stable, we are going to look forward towards new features and problems to solve. The 2.x line has found a strong install base and user community, and we'd like to look towards those users to understand what they wish they could see in future versions. Some ideas that have been thrown out include:

 * Tool support (plugins for building standard CRUD UIs in Eclipse and IDEA)
 * More client-side interactive support (taking advantage of the XML/HTTP support in IE and Mozilla)
 * Better integration efforts with other popular frameworks, such as Hibernate and Spring

Please feel free to add your suggestions to the list. Alternatively, if you want to discuss any ideas thrown out here, please do so.

Links

WebWork: http://www.opensymphony.com/webwork

Release notes and changes

Documentation

Maybe it's a great framework, but the docs are scarce. I was fighting to find out how to access the servlet init params for hours.

The most basic example of how to componetize a DataSource defined in tomcat is missing. No lifecycle details, tags have basic description, no detailes ...

I am trying to learn webwork, but without my struts background (basic) I would be lost. Funny! I am strugling not to drop this exercise.

What a pitty.

Regards,
Horia

Horia,
While the docs have improved quite a bit over the last two releases, I'm sure there is still tons of work to do. Please feel free to get active on the mailing list and more often than not the topics covered there eventually find there way in to the documentation.

Patrick

Patrick,

I agree that digging in mail-lists or other resources will pop more usefull information. I just wanted to say that in order to adopt WW fast, the docs should be more verbose. WW is a proprietary framework, is not an impelmentation of some standard so the docs and concepts could be backed by the specs themself.

Regards,
Horia

Maybe SourceBeat can give WebWork some Live.

Greetings,

I am new to X/WebWork and while learning it I found its limited support for JSP. Maybe it just me or maybe WebWork's poor documentation. I am not trying to criticize software. There are many cool features in WebWork (for example: file upload interceptors, validation interceptors, transaction token generation, etc.), but there are also features that are still missing. Here are my thoughts:

It is hard to get WebWork's stack values from JSP. There are some UI JSP tags that let you access values from WebWork's stack but their implementation lucks "friendliness", for example: why does text field tag outputs label? Somebody may say "...then use property tag..." unfortunately, that is only one acceptable option that I could find. But still, I would expect more support for JSP and JSTL. I want to be able to use JSTL to access WebWork properties without digging deep into request attributes. Is there special interceptor or result type that makes WebWork's stack values easier to access from JSP?

Thanks in advance,

Taras

Taras,

... for example: why does text field tag outputs label? Somebody may say "...then use property tag..." unfortunately, that is only one acceptable option that I could find.

The answer is in the documentation:

http://www.opensymphony.com/webwork/wikidocs/Themes.html

By default, the UI tags are using xhtml theme, which has those table tag decoration as well as the label. If you don't want that, you can add theme="'simple'" to your tag. Better yet, you can create your own theme and customize it to suit your specific needs.

But still, I would expect more support for JSP and JSTL. I want to be able to use JSTL to access WebWork properties without digging deep into request attributes. Is there special interceptor or result type that makes WebWork's stack values easier to access from JSP?

There was an answer in the documentation too but it's not easy to find now, so I just post the link here:

http://wiki.opensymphony.com/display/WW/Using+WebWork2+and+XWork1+with+JSP+2.0+and+JSTL+1.1

Basically, webwork is using OGNL for the properties. If you want to use JSTL, you'll need to use an interceptor (provided in the above link) to expose those properties to request attributes.

Like Patrick said above, you'll get more help if you can join the mailling list. There're a lot of helpful people there.

HTH,

Dennis

Thank you very much, Dennis!

I've used WebWork 2.x version on my last project and really liked it. On a previous project, I used Struts which is also quite good. Looking forward to try out the new version!

Harald

There are just

too

many

frameworks