Blogging Roller

Jason Carreira convinced his company to go with Webwork over Struts. From the Webwork mailing list:

Jason Carreira: Well, it really came down to usability issues. We looked at things like having to have separate FormBeans tied to the Actions 1-1 (because you have to cast to the expected FormBean subclass). Also, we looked at some sample code for Struts and Webwork (we looked at code for Chiki, a Wiki implemented with Struts, and Jira. Thanks Mike for having clean code!). It was very apparent that you had to do a lot of busy work to initialize things and do the setup that the framework should have done for you in Struts, whereas in Webwork, it was pretty much all business code. Command driven actions were also a big hit, as our lead architect came from a Next background, and apparently they did code like that all the time. In general, I think it was just a general feeling that Webwork was better abstracted and architected than Struts.

One interesting point: Jason used Struts' popularity against Struts by arguing that Webwork's smaller user and developer base would make it easier for his company to lobby for and submit changes and improvements.