Aug 24
Patrick Lightbody is talking about WebWork 2.2: JSR168 (Portlet) Support!.
Personally, I think that WW2 is a bit of a sleeping giant. It does a good job at hitting the niche that Rails hits wrt:
- Close to HTML on the view… but your code is not tied to request/session/…
- Simple, simple, simple
- interceptors are nice and clean
- Interesting Ajax support (and a lot more happening)
I hope that people take a fresh look at WebWork 2 and see the elegance, for those who aren’t into the component model.
August 24th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
Agreed, and this is why Struts Ti, a proposal for the successor to Struts classic currently in the Struts sandbox, is building directly on top of WebWork 2. We are hoping to combine WebWork with RoR ideas, Spring IoC, Beehive’s Page Flow, and some rapid development ideas from Cocoon to lower the learning curve for web development.
Furthermore, there is no intrinsic reason JSF or a another component-based view technology is incompatible with WebWork2. JSF is weak already on the controller layer as it was designed to focus on the view, so I think there is still a need for a robust controller technology, be it Shale, Webwork2 or hopefully Struts Ti for JSF applications.
August 24th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
The AJAX taglibs in WW2.2 looks great. I am currently in the process of converting from 2.0. They have also made the syntax for referencing objects within JSP even simpler.
The next thing I would love to see from WW2 is a fork of the Displaytag library integrated into thier taglibs. There is no one at the rudder for Displaytag.
August 24th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
The problem with Display Tag is that Fabrizio Giustina re-wrote the whole thing and is the primary developer on the project. However, he doesn’t seem to want to do any support on the mailing lists or forums. I try to help out on the mailing lists when I can, but it seems like I’m one of the few. If I knew the code better (i.e. I wrote it), I might be inclined to help out more. Another example of a open source project that’s not very developer-friendly. User friendly, yes, b/c it works – but it seems like it’s hard to contribute. At least to me.
August 24th, 2005 at 3:40 pm
Matt: I agree completely. It’s so frustrating that the project has a very vibrant user community but the lead developer dissapears for months at a time. I am a big proponent of someone just forking the thing and taking it over.
It’s so frustrating that I have started looking at http://www.extremecomponents.org.
August 24th, 2005 at 10:32 pm
Not to take away from WW but people might also be interested to know Tapestry 4 also supports Portlets. I haven’t tried it myself but the implementation looks pretty easy to use.