Now that I'm toying with the idea of WebWork 2.0 and XWork, I'd like to mention that I've been thinking about using SiteMesh to replace the IncludeTag stuff in WebWork 1.x. They have a very strong overlap, but SiteMesh is a bit more powerful and it'd be great to make use of SiteMesh in an area other than what it's famous for (the PageFilter). Don't have time for an example of the overlap, but maybe later I'll put one up if someone asks.

11:37:23 PM    comment []

I got an idea today (it was entirely my idea, no one else suggested it first -- hehe, J.O.): What if XWork and WebWork were both developed actively and released as seperate projects? XWork would be the "kernel" for WebWork and would focus entirely on non-web-related stuff. Essentially, it would be be nothing more than a generic command pattern framework as well as a nice lifecycle/IoC system (thanks again, JoeW) similar to Avalon. But the point is that it'd be small. In fact, I built this in sandbox and it came out to 1500 lines of code and only 32KB as a jar file.

Then there would be WebWork, which would include a ServletDispatcher, better configuration settings for the web, and a huge amount of focus on the the taglibs and macros for JSP and Velocity. This would include Jasper Reports stuff as well, and all that jazz. And of course, WebWork 2.0 would depend on XWork 1.0 (which, as stated above, would be a tiny jar file)

I think that this would solve the complaints of both parties ("it won't be web-specific enough" and "it won't be generic enough") and would allow for both projects to bloom in the direction that they should. I don't think that this is a far-fetched idea. In fact, I know it's possible and I think it'll work out well. I've already made a WebWork subdirectory in the sandbox CVS module and moved the web-specific stuff of XWork in there.

Any thoughts?

11:34:14 PM    comment []

Anyone know why there hasn't been a nice ant task that essentially gives the user a little text input field where they can type in task names and have them executed? This would be just like the maven console, but of course for ant. Would make building apps even quicker, since we could keep the ant process running and just press "[up-arrow] [enter]" to rebuild. Of course, this is for when you aren't using it with IDEA... you ARE doing that, right?
11:24:45 PM    comment []