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.