Customer Reviews

Webwork in Action

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

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.

This is an excellent book that covers all of the significant features in WebWork: configuration, actions, interceptors, Inversion of Control, OGNL, JSP tags, validation and localization. There is even a chapter on best practices including ways to test WebWork without deploying to the application server over and over again.

While 2.1.7 was the newest version available when the book went to print, there are several important changes in 2.2.x that are discussed in detail throughout the book. Programming books have a tendency to become to out-of-date very quickly, so it's refreshing to see the authors put in extra effort to extend the book's shelf life.

WebWork is an open source (free) software package that is a framework to facilitate the building of well-designed applications that are modular and reusable. It works in the J2EE environment and adds a structure to mostly web based applications that makes them easier to write, easier to debug, and especially easier to go back into for bug fixing or the next version.

This book is written by the two primary developers working on WebWork. The book starts quite simply with the standard 'Hello World' application that is then modified with a form input and to show off just a bit more, an input validation test is made. The basic program is then modified again to show how WebWork can make a tedious task easier.

From here the book proceeds in tutorial fashion to cover all of the functions available in version 2.1.7 (the latest release is 2.2 Beta 4).

With the November 27, 2005 announcement that WebWork is to be joining with Struts, the features described in this book are likely to become a major upgrade in the newer versions of Struts to be available in a year or so.

In the shadow of the most popular java web framework (Apache Struts) grew another great framework that seemed to learn from all the limitations that still frustrate many developers using the struts 1.x codebase. It has been announced that Struts 2.0 will be based on the WebWork 2.2.x code. Since there are no Struts 2.0 books at the time of this review, this is the best place to start learning the future of Struts ahead of pack. The book is well written and I found it be a good introduction to MVC development in general. Very thorough. The only thing that prevents the 5th star is the fact that after the book was published they decided to use Spring IOC as their default IOC container. While this is great decision, it also means that the whole section on the webwork's internal IOC container that got dropped is pretty much dead paper. Otherwise, great book!

Well done! Few computer books (I can only think of "Perl cookbook") have given me so much satisfaction. Very straightforward, the authors obviously know their jobs and they make a nice effort to deal with every issue worth mentioning. While I read it, every time a question/doubt popped in my mind, I was gladly surprised to find the clear answer some paragraphs later. Completely tuned with the style.
This is a book for people with some knowledge of the basics (Java-based web applications). I was planning to migrate from Struts1 to Struts2 and was frustrated by the available docs (the online book "Starting Struts2" was very weak for me); this book was exactly what I was looking for. Granted, Struts2 is not Webwork, but it is heavily based on it, so -in spite of some changes and dated bits- the heart of the information (and more important, the main concepts) are really here.

If you are doing Struts2 development, this is probably the best resource around. Hopefully that will change in the coming months. For the most part, the Webworks principals described in this book map over almost exactly to the Apache Struts2 project (with minor exceptions). I purchased this book for all of my developers and we were easily able to complete our project. I definitely recommend this book.

Really good book for webwork developers. Suggest to have next edition to reflect new changes,updates, and lesson learn(from previous edition) in webwork.