[ANNOUNCEMENT] Apache Struts and Open Symphony WebWork communities to merge

[Martin Cooper <ma...@apache.org>]

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/].