These are the steps required to use WebWork.

  1. Download WebWork. The latest release can be found at SourceForge.
  2. Unpack the distribution to your directory of choice.
  3. If you want to try the examples, then install either webwork.war or webwork.ear in your application server.
  4. Copy /lib/webwork.jar into the /WEB-INF/lib/ directory of your own web application. WebWork relies on a few supporting jars for certain functionality. These are located in the supporting-jars folder. Note that you might not require many of these, depending on the views and features you use. The only jar file requires for webwork is commons-logging.jar. You will need to place these in your classpath. This may be in WEB-INF/lib or some other location. You may use any javax.xml parser instead of Saxon.
  5. For your convenience, a bare-bones skeleton project is also included in the download, this can be found in etc/skeleton-project.zip. It contains a very simple web application that you can unpack. You will need to build the example action provided (a build.xml file is included), and then deploy the skeleton webapp into your servlet container.
  6. Modify your web.xml file to include the settings found in $WEBWORK/src/resources/web/WEB-INF/web.xml file in the WebWork distribution.
  7. If you don't want to use the tag-library, Velocity, or XSLT, simply don't include those elements in your web.xml file.
  8. WebWork uses commons-logging. If you don't already have commons-logging set up on your application server, then you will need to add it. Copy the downloaded jar file into an appropriate lib folder. For instance, if you are using Tomcat, then place it in {installed directory}\lib. It is also appropriate to install commons-logging in the web application itself, but if the application server uses commons-logging itself, you may need to be very careful due to version clashes.
  9. If you want to use WebWork with a pure Java client, then add webworkclient.jar to your client's classpath. This will allow it to use WebWork using the ClientServlet dispatch method. In addition, your client will need a reference to commons-logging.jar.
  10. This is all you need to do. Now you can start writing WebWork actions and views, which you use to build your applications.
  11. If you run into any problems, either refer to the FAQ in this document, or use the WebWork user mailing list. Subscription info for the mailing list is available at the OpenSymphony Mailing Lists page on SourceForge.