September 3, 2003

WebWork Case Studies?

WebWork is purported to be a superior MVC framework to Struts.

Not that I'm doubting it. I'm not qualified to do so, because I haven't used it yet; I've only read about it. And the little I've read sounds good.

I recently posted an entry about Struts and quickly received some advice that I should be using WebWork to avoid what I found to be the cumbersome nature of Struts configuration.

What I'm curious to discover now is how widely used WebWork is in serious industrial applications. I know Struts is widely used - it is even supported by the smarts in the latest version of WebSphere Studio Application Developer.

Can anyone point me to some examples of WebWork being used on significant applications?

Posted to Software Development by Keith Pitty
Comments

This isn't quite an answer, but a tangent: Struts may be supported in WSAD5, but it's eye-candy only - it doesn't actually make developing struts much easier, if you're already comfortable with XML. You still have to KNOW STRUTS, to the point where the eye candy is convenience only; you still have to buy in to how struts strangles your application in order to get anything done.

Posted by: Mr. Anonymous #2 at September 3, 2003 10:28 PM

Yes, agreed. I know from experience the challenge of "getting your head around" Struts. As I said, I've heard good things about WebWork but I don't know how widely used it is and, therefore, how mature it is.

Posted by: Keith Pitty at September 3, 2003 10:38 PM

The biggest example that comes to mind is JIRA, the bug tracking tool by Atlassian. A very nice tool.

Posted by: Rob at September 3, 2003 11:26 PM

WebWork is used in a lot of commercial apps, just not a lot I can point you to on the web :-)

For instance, I know Patrick Lightbody implemented a lot of internal apps for Cisco using WebWork, but those are internal. We're switching our app over from a proprietary framework to WebWork, but it's not available for public consumption... Jira and javablogs.com are the most visible examples of WebWork, although if you can read Swedish or whatever you can look at Rickard's CMS :-)

Posted by: Jason Carreira at September 4, 2003 12:03 AM

The 3.x series of Jive Forums and the newly hatched Jive Knowledge Base both use WebWork 1.3 for their default skins. We'll be looking at upgrading to WebWork 2.x for the next major iterations of our products.

Posted by: Bruce Ritchie at September 4, 2003 12:07 AM

I'm using WebWork 2.0 for a application for DG Regio (European Commission) developed at Intrasoft. Works quite nicely and is accepted by the EC.

Posted by: Mathias Bogaert at September 4, 2003 12:55 AM

We're using WW 1.3 for pretty much everything in our CMS product SiteVision. Works great.

Posted by: Rickard at September 4, 2003 1:17 AM