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20060221 Tuesday February 21, 2006

Upgrading Equinox to WebWork 2.2.1 In addition to upgrading Tapestry last week, I also upgraded Equinox to WebWork 2.2.1 (from 2.1.5). The commit log can be found on Fisheye. The changes I had to make were pretty minor:

  • WebWork 2.2.1 easily integrates with Spring - you just need to add webwork.objectFactory=spring to your webwork.properties file. This isn't a whole lot different from 2.1.5, except that you can get rid of the SpringObjectFactoryListener from web.xml.
  • ServletDispatcher has been deprecated in favor of FilterDispatcher - which should map to <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>. Using a filter for the controller is an obvious improvement, and it's pretty slick how WebWork can now add CSS and JavaScript to your pages on-the-fly.
  • WebWork now has a <ww:datepicker> component which makes it possible to do easily do popup calendars like you can with Tapestry and JSF. Unfortunately, it seems you still can't set a global date format using a ResourceBundle.
  • AltSyntax is on my default, which means you'll need to change "'literal string'" to "literal string" and "variable" to "%{variable}". This is much easier to read and a welcome change. It's unfortunate that ${} can't be used, but that's JSP's fault, not WebWork's.
  • FreeMarker is required, even if you're just using JSP. This is because the JSP tags' HTML is generated using FreeMarker templates (I think).
  • The taglib URI has changed from "webwork" to "/webwork". I wonder why they don't use the full URL like most tag libraries?
  • Exception mappings have been added so you can easily map a particular exception to a specific view. This allowed me to remove a custom interceptor I'd previously wrote.
  • The DTD for xwork.xml has changed from xwork-1.0.dtd to xwork-1.1.1.dtd.
  • The only issues I found were that the validator interceptor makes it difficult to override "excludeMethods" and client-side validation renders duplicate messages when you click submit multiple times.
  • When I deployed the latest Equinox demo to Contegix, we had some issues with the stylesheet the datepicker stuffs in the <head>. Basically, mod_caucho 3.0.14 wasn't returning the proper content-type for the stylesheet (even though it was for the rest). Upgrading to Resin 3.0.17 with mod_proxy fixed the problem.

Hopefully this helps you upgrade to WebWork 2.2.1. Posted in Java at Feb 21 2006, 04:21:24 PM MST 2 Comments

Comments:

Will you please tell me how to use Client side Validation in Webwork 2.1.7

Posted by Meghana Patil on April 29, 2006 at 05:47 AM MDT #

Are you using AppFuse or Equinox? If so, client side validation doesn't work with model=based validation rules. If you move the rules up to the Action, it should work. You could also look into using DWR with 2.2 for client-side validation.

Posted by Matt Raible on April 29, 2006 at 10:00 AM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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