Welcome to the WebWork blog!
Welcome to the official WebWork blog. You can count on this being the place to find out about all the latest developments with WebWork, as well as interact with the WebWork development team.
While this is the first entry in this blog, it couldn't be further from the truth that work has not been going on at an amazing pace the last few weeks. Just tonight we completed another major milestone on the way to getting version 2.2 final out the door.
As of today, here are just some of the things that have been worked on lately:
- Documentation overhaul - nobody understands more than us that docs are critical to a project's success. So we're in the midst of a massive documentation cleanup, with Jay Bose taking lead on the project. Please check out the docs and help out where you can (there are tons of TODOs where work needs to happen).
- Switched to Ivy - both XWork and WebWork now use Ivy to resolve their dependencies. This makes the downloads much smaller and has finally allowed us to take back control of all the dependencies. Related to that...
- Got rid of "core" and "optional" libraries and everything up much more fine-grained using Ivy. This means that you can pick and choose your needs and get just the right jars for you. For example, you might want the configurations: freemarker, hibernate, and fileupload.
- Added Hibernate and iBatis support directly in WebWork, making it even easier to get started writing a web application that needs to access a database.
- Added special SiteMesh filters that pull up Velocity or FreeMarker templates through WebWork's native integration points with the respective template language. This is much better as it no longer requires any sort of Servlet, nor a Servlet Dispatcher. Also, you now don't have to pick between integrating Velocity with SiteMesh or WebWork - you can get the best of both worlds!
- A sweet rapid development environment nicknamed "Prototype". Using Jetty, a compiling class reloading, and some intelligent component management/reloading logic provided by XWork's IoC container, you can write applications faster than even any scripting language!
- Awesome AJAX support built on top of DWR and Dojo. Form validation, tabbed panels, remotable forms, and remote divs. More AJAX components will be coming in subsequent releases.
- Thanks to Cenqua, java.net, and Contegix, we now have FishEye support (WebWork and XWork) for easy browsing of the source repositories.
At this point, only documentation is keeping us from releasing WebWork 2.2 final. As you might notice, WebWork is moving beyond just a web application framework. It is now a complete web development environment.
Oh, and did we mention WebWork 2.2 Beta 1 was released? You can grab it here.