XWork 1.0.1 Released

The OpenSymphony group is proud to announce the release of XWork 1.0.1. This new release paves the way for future versions of WebWork as well as new products such as "SwingWork" and other concepts that are thought up every day by OpenSymphony's active community.

New Features

The biggest addition to XWork is the new ObjectFactory which allows for tight integration to other projects such as Spring and Pico. Not only that, the ObjectFactory is very useful to integrate XWork in to your existing project infrastructure. Documentation (both reference manuals and JavaDocs) have been greatly improved as well.

Bug Fixes

There have been several important bug fixes, the most important is a performance-related bug fix that makes the expression language magnitudes faster. This also solved an extremely rare problem where some applications would lock up.

Special Thanks

Special thanks go out to Bill Lynch of Jive Software for helping with all the added JavaDocs. Mark Woon has also done a superb job assisting with bug fixes, new features, and documentation.

About WebWork

WebWork is a leading open source Java web application framework. Developed originally by Rickard Oberg (original developer of JBoss and creator of XDoclet, among other accomplishments), WebWork aims to lower the bar for developing web applications by making the more tedious tasks of web development automated. By taking the best features from other web frameworks available today, WebWork represents a best-of-bread solution to web development created by through the feedback of an active OpenSymphony community.

WebWork is built on top of XWork, a generic command pattern framework. WebWork uses the capabilities of XWork to provide the following features:

  • Advanced UI components, allowing you to build complex, reusable UI components, ranging from simple text fields to advanced date pickers.
  • A robust inversion of control (IoC) container that binds to the native Servlet lifecycles: request, session, and application.
  • Pluggable configuration, allowing you to develop web "modules" that can easily be integrated together to form complete applications independently.
  • Complete data mapping from HTTP to Java data objects, enabling you to focus more on application development and less on tedious data conversion.
  • A complete validation framework, both on the server side and client side. This lets you choose the most optimal way to ensure user input is correct before processing it.
  • An advanced expression language, based on OGNL, providing the most common operations usually associated with building web-based user interfaces.
  • Support for integration with many popular open source projects, including: Spring, Pico, OSWorkflow, FreeMarker, Velocity, JasperReports, JFreeChart, and many more.