As of WebWork 2.2, Spring is the preferred IoC container

.

A simple example of using WebWork components is available in the webwork-example.war that comes with the WebWork 2.0 Beta 1 distribution. You can download the distribution from https://webwork.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList .

Components are defined _/WEB-INF/classes/components.xml_.

The example consists of one component, which is defined by

<component>
  <scope>session</scope>
  <class>com.opensymphony.webwork.example.counter.Counter</class>
  <enabler>com.opensymphony.webwork.example.counter.CounterAware</enabler>
</component>

com.opensymphony.webwork.example.counter.Counter is just a POJO.

com.opensymphony.webwork.example.counter.CounterAware is an interface which your *Action classes have to implement.

public interface CounterAware {
    public void setCounter(Counter counter);
}

Additionally, you need to tag your actions with the intercepter, for example,

<action name="SimpleCounter" class="com.opensymphony.webwork.example.counter.SimpleCounter">
  <result name="success" type="dispatcher">
    <param name="location">/success.jsp</param>
  </result>
  <interceptor-ref name="defaultComponentStack"/>
</action>

WebWork will call the interface and set the Counter bean . The Counter bean would then be subsequently be available to be used by your *Action classes.