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Tapestry Making Web Development a Breeze?
An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article on how to simplify your Web-based development with Tapestry, an open-source, Java-based framework that makes developing a breeze. The article shows you around Tapestry, from installation to file structure. See for yourself how Tapestry facilitates servlet-based Web application development using HTML and template tags."
IMHO, this article is really poorly written. When reading an article on this kind of topic, I want the first couple of paragraphs to tell me what is new/unique about this tool. Instead the author wastes endless column space describing how to install the software, then more space describing the sample applications that you could look at yourself once you downloaded it anyway. I want to be given a reason to try it out: What makes this tool powerful; how can it save me time/help me to produce cleaner code? Maybe he got to this by the end of the article, but I had given up by then.
I've worked with Tapestry. Is it a decent framework? Yes. Did we end up choosing it over JSF for our project? Yes, we did. Did it make development "a breeze"? No.
In my experience, Tapestry simplifies some complex tasks and helps you write reasonably clean, well-structured code. This is, I think, all anyone should realistically hope for from any framework. However, it isn't a magic bullet and we did find that things became a little gnarly as soon as we tried to do stuff that the Tapestry developers hadn't really anticipated or designed for (and the things we were trying to do weren't really very exotic).
Of the frameworks I've seen lately, Ruby on Rails is the one that bends the curve the furthest in the trade-off between 'what you can do' and 'how easy it is to do it'. Tapestry is a way behind that, but it's nevertheless a solid addition to anyone's toolkit, so long as you don't have unrealistic expectations of what it can do for you.
Meaningless tautology.
Language doesn't matter at all.
Baseless assertion.
There's difference in functionality between one language and another, true. That's because different languages were built to different specifications and purposes:
And here you contradict your own baseless assertion.
no first-person shooters written in assembly,
Ok, here is a good example. Lets say all you had was assembly language and perhaps FORTRAN to perform some "high level" math operations. Lets say someone asked you to create an FPS. Now, it could probably be done. You'd have to figure out how to interact with the graphics hardware at the register level. You'd have to write almost every single function by hand from aside from whatever math functions you can utilize from FORTRAN. So 6 months into development someone comes along an says, "Hey, here is this new language called C and a library called OpenGL. These will make your FPS development a whole lot easier. It solves the really hard problems of dealing with hardware and makes your code work on many different kinds of graphics cards." Are you saying that you would run screaming from this offer because it couldn't possibly make your work easier? Unless you are some really f'ing hardcore assembly programmer, I bet you coudl cut your development time by an order of magitude at least. You could probably even afford to complete dump that previous 6 months of development in the trash and STILL come out ahead because you found a new tool/language which makes a perviously hard program relatively easier.
Contrary to your initial baseless assertion, language DOES matter. Frameworks matter. Libraries matter. There are, in fact, all kinds of things that can make a particular project easier.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death