WebWork 2: Strutting the OpenSymphony Way

Many web frameworks suffer from being tightly coupled to the Servlet spec when it is not necessary, especially Struts. This makes both unit testing your Actions and reusing them outside a web application very difficult or impossible. With WebWork 2.0, the OpenSymphony team went back to the drawing board to separate the core command pattern implementation, which has become the XWork project, from the web framework specific code, WebWork 2.0, which leverages the power of XWork at its core.

Many web frameworks suffer from being tightly coupled to the Servlet spec when it is not necessary, especially Struts. This makes both unit testing your Actions and reusing them outside a web application very difficult or impossible. With WebWork 2.0, the OpenSymphony team went back to the drawing board to separate the core command pattern implementation, which has become the XWork project, from the web framework specific code, WebWork 2.0, which leverages the power of XWork at its core.

In this talk we'll cover the powerful features XWork provides including Interceptors, per-class and per-property type conversion rules, i18n localization, XWork IoC (a simple Inversion of Control container), the XWork Validation Framework, the OGNL (Object Graph Navigation Language) expression language, and more.

We'll also take a look at the features added by WebWork on top of XWork, including view support for Velocity, JasperReports, and FreeMarker, as well as our custom JSP taglib. We'll look in depth at the templating system behind the JSP tags, how to build your own templated JSP tags and components, and how the tags interact with the ValueStack using OGNL.

We will also look at other technologies which marry nicely with WebWork such as SiteMesh, the powerful API that allows you to decorate a look and feel on your application.

About Dion Almaer

Dion Almaer is the founder and CTO of Adigio, Inc. He is an architect, mentor, pragmatic, and evangelist of technologies such as J2EE, JDO, AOP, and Groovy. He is the Editor-in-Chief of TheServerSide.com J2EE Community and enjoys working in the community. He is a member of the Java Community Process, where he participates on various expert groups.

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