Web Work - Design Goals and Overview

Design Goals and Overview

In a standard Java EE web application, the client will typically submit information to the server via a web form. The information is then either handed over to a Java Servlet which processes it, interacts with a database and produces an HTML-formatted response, or it is given to a JavaServer Pages (JSP) document which intermingles HTML and Java code to achieve the same result. Both approaches are often considered inadequate for large projects because they mix application logic with presentation and make maintenance difficult.

WebWork attempts to understand existing frameworks' limitations and works to eliminate them. It supports type conversion, continuations, and interceptors. WebWork also supports multiple-view technologies like JSP, velocity, and FreeMarker.

Ultimately, WebWork has been designed and implemented with a specific set of goals, that are very important for its users. They are as follows:

1. Web Designer never has to touch Java code
2. Create multiple "Web Skins" for an application
3. Change Look and Feel
4. Change Layout on a given Web Page
5. Change Flow among Web Pages
6. Move *existing* data elements from one page to another
7. Integrate with various backend infrastructures
8. Reuse components
9. Perform internationalization (i18n) of a web application
10. Keep the API small and to the point
11. Ability to learn WebWork fast, by making all the fancier features optional
12. Allow the developer to choose how to implement as much as possible, while providing default implementations that work well in most cases