Blogging Roller

One of the appealing things about Webwork is that Webwork actions are not tied to the web (i.e. the Servlet API) in the way that Struts actions are. You can use Webwork as a generic action framework, implement your business APIs as actions, and then re-use those APIs behind any UI technology: web, Swing, AWT, command-line, etc. You've probably heard WebWork advocates tout this genericity as a major advantage of Webwork over Struts. According to Anders Hovmoeller, writing to the WebWork mailing list, it is the key advantage of WebWork over Struts:

Anders Hovmoeller In my opinion, the only really solid argument for using WW over say Struts is that we are not locked up in a certain environment. I firmly believe that the core parts of XW can easily avoid being tied up to servlets, as WW does now.

But this is opinion is not shared by all WebWorkers. Rickard Oberg, the original architect of Webwork (who recently resigned from his position as architect of the project), does not see it that way. This is from a Jan 13, 2003 post on the Webwork mailing list:

Rickard Oberg That WebWork turned out to be a generic command pattern was more of an accident then by design. Because of this genericity WebWork is not optimally designed for doing web work. Some of the "plumbing" needs to be done by actions themselves, instead of having it be done by the framework. I want to make WebWork/XWork *better* suited for the web, because that is what *I* *need*. I want to get more for less. I don't give a damn about making it work well in Swing. If it does, then whaddyaknow, cool. If it doesn't, shit happens. If there's ever a point where I need to decide between "keeping genericity, or making it work better for the web", the latter is a given.

If you are considering using Webwork instead of Struts for your webapp, you might want to follow along on the Webwork mailing list to see where it is heading. Is it continuing along the generic "XWork" framework path or will it turn and become even more web-friendly?

The Automatic Linkbacks feature still needs some work. In addition to title and excerpt, I need to extract a permalink for the refering entry. I also need to add a linkback editor so that linkback URLs, titles, and excerpts may be edited. Right now, linkbacks can be shown or hidden via the Roller Editor UI but that's all - other edits require SQL.