Web Security Dojo is a web application security lab with tools, targets, and training materials built into a Virtual Machine(VM). It is an open source project built on Ubuntu and hosted at SourceForge. It is available in three flavors: a Virtualbox VM, VMWare VM, and a build script which can be used on a standard Ubuntu 9.10 install to produce the Dojo. It is available free of cost.

If there’s one thing the Java community has an addiction for, it’s frameworks. There are 100s of Java frameworks and surprisingly there’s even a passionate community of users behind many. However only a handful of frameworks have made it big. Struts and WebWork figure in that list.

The two frameworks recently announced their plans to merge into Struts Ti / Struts Action Framework 2.0, which has resulted in some anxiety and uncertainty in both communitites.

In this interview we speak to Patrick Lightbody, project lead for WebWork and now a committer at Apache Struts. He answers several WebWork + Struts queries and also talks about Ajax frameworks and Ajax support in WebWork. The interview concludes with Patrick’s thoughts on Ruby on Rails and its relevance to the Java community.

In this interview, Dave Crane not only talks about Ajax but also about how Ajax can fit into the kind of applications and frameworks we are used to working with today. He also tells us why he feels Ajax has become so popular in such a short time and what lies in the future for Java based Ajax development.Dave is the author of “Ajax in Action” and has been working with Ajax technologies for several years.

IndicThreads >> Hi Dave. Congratulations on the publication of your book “Ajax In Action”. Could you tell us a little more about yourself and your involvement in Ajax?