Webwork in Action

By Jason Carreira and Patrick Lightbody

WebWork helps developers build well-designed applications quickly by creating re-usable, modular, web-based applications. WebWork in Action is the first book to focus entirely on WebWork. Like a true "Action" book, it is both a tutorial on WebWork and a sourcebook for its use in demanding, real-world applications. The book goes into considerable depth on how to get desirable web features with WebWork. It uses the same basic (continuing) example as in Manning's Hibernate in Action to show how to integrate WebWork with the popular Hibernate persistance framework.

Although Java was (correctly) touted as the next big programming language, it wasn't until the introduction of J2EE and Servlets that its use really took off. Yet, in spite of the huge popularity of JSPs and Servlets, it was never easy for developers to quickly create re-usable, modular web-based applications. Not long after the introduction of JSPs, WebWork sought to solve those very problems and has been helping thousands of developers ever since. WebWork is a web-application framework used by people who understand that somewhere been "just get it done, no matter how ugly" and "make it perfect" lies their best choice. WebWork helps developers build applications quickly, but its unique design also lets developers build beautifully-designed applications.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932394532
• ISBN13: 9781932394535
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Manning Publications
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good book for webwork developers

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

Great book but just a wee bit outdated.

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.

Great resource for getting started with WebWork

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 in Action is a great introdiction to Struts 2.0

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 fr

A Tutorial from the Horse's (Developers) Mouth

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.