OGNL 2.6.4 Released
OGNL 2.6.4 was released today. So you're asking - "Why do care? You don't use it?" You're right, I don't use it - but I will be soon. It's the Expression Language used in Tapestry and WebWork - which I hope to learn, beat and abuse in the coming months. I've also had some discussions with Drew about adding it as an EL option to the Display Tag. BTW, with the release of 2.6.4, XWork 1.0.1 and WebWork 2.1 will be released very soon - quoted from the WebWork mailing list.
A lot of the WW and Tapestry folks swear by it and claim it's vastly superior to JSTL's EL. As far as I can tell, it has some more advanced features (i.e. the ability to call a method), but it's not *that* much better. It's not going to revolutionize my webapp productivity - is it? Of course, Jason and Erik will argue that [ insert WebWork or Tapestry here ] is the real productivity enhancer. Personally, it's not the MVC frameworks that slow me down. It's the meetings, the requirements gathering and the UI tweaking (CSS and JavaScript) that takes the most time - as well as the occasional fumbling with Hibernate. That's unlikely to go away no matter what MVC framework I use.
That's why I use AppFuse - b/c most of the CSS and JavaScript I use on a project is already in there. A little massaging here and there, and the UI tweaking for the whole app can be done in a matter of hours. Of course, Tiles helps tremendously with this - as Sitemesh would I suspect.
I think what helps me the most about AppFuse is having a structured process for developing webapps. Create POJO -> Create DAO -> Create Manager, etc. I suspect that my process will stay the same with Tapestry and WebWork - so that's why I'm not afraid to learn them. The productivity-enhancing attributes of AppFuse will not go away with a new framework, but some parts may become a bit easier. Of course, you can bet that if I trip and fall along the way (which I likely will), you'll be able to hear about it here. Maybe someday this site will get as many hits for these frameworks as it does for Struts (up to 914 before this post).