14 Dec 2005 - Apache Struts, the leading web application framework for
Java, and Open Symphony WebWork, a leader in technical innovation, are
working to merge their communities and codebases.
"A merger is an elegant approach to evolution of existing applications
based on action-oriented frameworks," said Craig McClanahan, founder of
the Struts project.
The merger seems like a win-win for the frameworks. "The technical
benefit is that WebWork has already done most everything that is on the
Struts Action roadmap," noted Ted Husted, a Struts committer. "This is
a way that [Struts] shops can use incremental integration to take
advantage of new technologies that are already part of WebWork, like
Spring and Rife."
"My hope is to take advantage of a larger community (Struts) to allow
all of us to do a bit less individual effort." said Patrick Lightbody
of WebWork. "I would expect moving to Struts lets us focus on our
families and day jobs a bit more."
Apache projects help developers balance day jobs with volunteer work
through the practice of collaborative developement. Decisions are made
jointly by the core community, rather than by one or two key
individuals. The projects are organized so that individual developers
can focus on other matters for a time, and then return to the
development community as schedules allow.
Over the past few months, Apache Struts has more than doubled its
number of active committers. With the addition of two WebWork
developers, there are about fifteen active volunteers. Right now, about
half of the committers are working on the original Struts Action
Framework and half are working on the new Struts Shale Framework, which
utilizes JavaServer Faces. Several volunteers are now working with both
frameworks.
The merger and other milestones on the Apache Struts roadmap were
discussed in a talk at ApacheCon on Tuesday, December 13, 2005,
entitled "Struts 2006: An Embarrassment of Riches"
[http://people.apache.org/~husted/apachecon-2005-action.pdf]. The talk
will be presented by Lightbody, Husted, and Don Brown, another Struts
Committer. The Struts Shale framework is being discussed at a second
talk, presented by McClanahan, entitled "Shale: The Next Struts??"
[http://people.apache.org/~husted/apachecon-2005-shale.pdf].
For more about Struts, visit the Apache Struts Website [http://struts.apache.org/].
