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."

Comments

Written backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

DeveloperWorks is supporting open source community

[TapestryDude]

As the original author of Tapestry (but not the article on DeveloperWorks, which caught me by surprise) I can say that IBM doesn't have any secret agenda on this. In fact, given that IBM is selling a commercial product that competes head-to-head with Tapestry (their JavaServer Faces, built on top of their WebSphere proprietary Eclipse IDE) it is enlightened of them to cover Tapestry.

Of course, what's going on there is two fold. First, IBM is big enough that different areas of the organization will have different and occasionally competing goals. Primarily, all on-line magazines are constantly hunting for new material to keep the eyeballs looking (and the click rates clicking). IBM doesn't solicit authors to write on particular subjects, they accept existing authors efforts, with the authors pursuing their own interests. Here, Brett happened to be into Tapestry and did a great job providing additional documentation in the form of this article.

I make my living off of Tapestry, so I'm happy to see this kind of coverage, but the framework itself is open source and free, with a very, very liberal license (ASL 2.0). I make money by providing Tapestry support and training. There's your ad.

In even newer news, Tapestry 4.0 final release is now available.

Re:Easy web development with Java?

[Decaff]

        * 117 lines of very liberally spaced Python code, or
        * 138 lines of insecure PHP code, or
        * 3004 lines of Java code in 45 files, 29 lines of SQL, and 246 lines of XML configuration in five files.

Which is complete nonsense, as with Java you can use JSP tag libraries, which will are secure (compiled, so no code injection at run-time) and can be used in exactly the same way as PHP, so will require about the same size of code.

TANSTAAFL

[angusmci]

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.

Re:Rapid web development getting out of hand?

[misleb]

Bulletin: Easy programs are easy to write. Hard programs are hard to write.

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