6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Webwork in Action is a great introdiction to Struts 2.0, March 3, 2006
This review is from: Webwork in Action (Paperback)
I read Webwork in Action (Patrick Lightbody and Jason Carreira) over the holidays while waiting for my wife to give birth to our third child. It wasn't so much that I was bored and had nothing to do but it was just that I couldn't put the book down. It really is an engaging read. What surprised me was how well it was written relative to other framework books I have read. I actually used Webwork 1 a bit when it first was released and then switched to Struts because that was where my work was taking me. I now wish I had stuck with it for many reasons. The framework itself is IMHO the best request driven framework out there. It is a deserving successor to Struts and I look forward to using it everywhere I can.
What made the book so engaging was that it addresses issues that were straight out of every Java web developers list of "todos". For example using interceptors in Xwork as shown in Choater 5 struck a chord with me because every framework I have worked with so far has lacked a good way to separate out activities that occur on particular session or request. Filters work great as long as you only have a couple and they can be problematic if you are using someone else's filters. They also are tied to the servlet container. If I have a Swing app (which I hope to) for whatever webapp I am developing then suddenly you have business logic that is tied to the container and not the domain logic of the app. Interceptors give you this cohesiveness with loose coupling to the container. Jason and Patrick address this very issue at the end of Chapter 5.
Chapter 6 is a discussion of Inversion of Control pattern and then how Webwork implements this. They do an excellent job of simplifying the discussion of this pattern and this simplicity shows in Webwork as well. The CaveatEmptor example was used to demonstrate Hibernate access and although complex from the integration standpoint its not what I would call a "real world" example. As a result there still is that gap that exists in many books where there could be a large leap in moving from the example to the actual problem domain. It isn't however as "huge" a gap as in most books.
Chapter 8 was especially enjoyable for me because it addressed some issues that I have run across in the development of larger scale apps. OGNL is great way to handle the domain model for an application. The chapter seemed to explain it well but we'll see after I actually create an application using it.
I would also like to see more added to Chapter 15 "Best Practices". It was a good chapter but I felt it was touching the surface of what is trying to talk about but only briefly wetted my appetite for more. I guess I'll have to try to build further on these usage ideas.
Despite some simplistic examples Webwork in Action is a great book and an excellent introduction to the next generation of request oriented frameworks. The writing is engaging and it is easy to read. It also makes you want to go get the framework and start playing.
Thats what I am going to do now.
http://jroller.com/page/mmorton8
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book but just a wee bit outdated., November 10, 2006
This review is from: Webwork in Action (Paperback)
This book does an excellent job of explaining about WebWork straight from the developers of the project.
The online material about webwork gives you very limited knowledge about this fantastic framework. But this book takes care of all the gaps.
If the authors had replaced the velocity chapter with a corresponding chapter on Freemarker( which is now the official templating language of Webwork) it would have been fabulous. But in their defence, it should be stated that it is almost impossible to keep abreast of a framework such as this.
Struts 2 Integration seems to promise webwork a lot more potential. I have been involved in projects that are already using Struts 2. There is nothing to not love about this framework. This book does a brilliant job of revealing it to us.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Buy an 8lb bag of coffee before you dive in, January 9, 2007
This review is from: Webwork in Action (Paperback)
Well, keeping in line with the AJAX in Action book I just read, this thing is a real cure for the insomniac. The authors of these books manage to drain every last bit of excitement out of even the latest of technologies. However, the topics do get covered if you can manage to keep your eyes awake. Through-out the read I often found myself rereading entire chapters because I just end up loosing interest. Also, it is written in such a manner that it begins to dig deeper into topics without first providing a strong foundation of the basics. For example, the first four chapters are using intercepts all through the code, however the reader still has very little or no idea what an intercept actually is. Examples are spread too far apart and sometimes there are no code examples to drive home a point. This will be my last In Action book purchase.
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