Since I’ve been introduced to WebWork, I was a serious proponent. It was built on some interesting technologies. Implemented some great concepts. Things that are now considered standard for any self-respecting web-mvc framework. After some evolution, WebWorkis now Struts2. Since I considered myself a proponent, I’ve followed most releases. Especially the security-related items.
Recently I decided to leave the 2.0.x series, and upgrade to the 2.1.x path. After a little work, you can piece together the major changes you need to adhere. For me, the biggest change was the built-in Dojo support. As of 2.1, it’s an optional, external module, which is fine. I went about making the changes. Things like changing my theme from Ajax to XHtml. Importing the Dojo taglibs into the necessary pages. Nothing too complicated. More time-consuming than anything.
OK, so I ran into a problem. I worked at it for a good weekend. After banging my head against this one, with no resolution, I sought help on the user-list. No response. None of this really bothered me. What really bothered me was my naiveté.
The affected projects are all on svn. For some reason, I did the upgrade on HEAD. So, after no resolution, I had to revert. Since the upgrade included some other libs (Hibernate-3.3, some Commons modules, etc), I actually had to revert and then reapply some other upgrades.
Regardless of your personal feelings for a framework/library, don’t ever assume it’s going to be that easy! If you have a source control tool, use it. A branch for these upgrades would have made things a bit easier. I used to think branches were for teams larger than 2-3. Yeah, not so much. It’s not a problem to adopt a release/technology early, it’s all in how you do it. Ugh, lesson learned.