The Confluence wiki has been a great way to compose the documentation for WebWork 2, but it doesn’t always do a good job of revealing just how much documentation there really is (e.g. 700 wiki pages!). To make the documentation more accessible, Philip Luppens cobbled up a new documentation start page. Great work, Phillip!.

It started out innocently enough. I wanted to get started on a MailReader for WebWork to serve as the basis of a new MailReader training course. In setting up the folders, it occured to me that I should get started on the “Cookbook” application too, and add generic cases to the Cookbook for everything in MailReader. Since the MailReader has a set of Use Cases now, it only made sense to have Use Cases for the Cookbook too. Since, ultimately, the Cookbook should illustrate all the primary uses of the framework, then, gee, the framework should have its own set of use cases too.

For Use Cases, I like the Cockburn format (“co-burn”). In his svelte Writing Effective Use Cases, Cockburn points out that while Use Cases are part of the requirements, they are not all of the requirements. Cockburn also provides what he calls “A plausible requirements outline,” and he puts the Use Cases in chapter 3. If the Action 2 framework was going to have Use Cases, may be it should have a Requirements document too.

I got a good start on drafting some plausible software requirements for WebWork/Action2, but only a start. First, I needed to finish up on StrutsCentral.net and PlanetStruts.org. Those are ready to launch now, and so I can get back to the WebWork Use Cases, Cookbook, and MailReader this week.

To make the Struts Action Framework easier for us to maintain, some time ago, we decided to subdivide the original monolithic distribution into seven subprojects. Each subproject was to have its own website, documentation, and release cycle, and could be downloaded separately. I’m happy to say that the initial builds for the svelte seven are now available.

• Action
• Apps
• EL
• Extras
• Taglib

• Tiles
  Also available is a “boostrap” distribution of the Struts Action Library, containing the JARs these subproject builds and other related dependencies:

• Action Library
  Taken together, these products are the successor to Struts 1.2, so each has started out at version 1.3.0.

I’d like to extend my personal gratitude to James Mitchell and Wendy Smoak, who worked so very hard to revamp the Apache Struts infrastructure, and thereby made these builds possible.

Although still under development, the Struts Mentor site is already hard at work (Praise Google!), and I now have a WebWork training course scheduled for May. Although, we’re just getting started on the OK DEQ stuff again, I’ve blocked out this week to work on a Struts MailReader for WebWork, along with some other new documentation. Duty now for the future!

After a ten-week hiatus, I’m finally back to work on my ASP.NET project with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality. We spent the week picking up where we left off. Our applications are based on the Nexus framework in the Struts sandbox, so you can expect to see new activity there now. Maybe one day, we can attract a community and bring OverDrive out of the sandbox!