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Saturday, August 15, 2009

Detailed analysis of Tapestry 5

Sebastian Hennebrueder has just finished a detailed analysis of Tapestry 5. He comes at it from a few odd angles (for instance, he likes PicoContainer and shows how to integrate it). After a few misteps, he reaches these conclusions:

Once I overcame the first hurdles, I became more and more impressed. Building CRUD (create, read, update, delete) dialogs is incredible fast. The form component renders a form for a model, adding labels, input fields and validations. All this information is extracted from the model and its annotation and you don't have to write a single line of code. Here is the code for a complete form.

<t:beaneditform object="person"/>

You have control over the generated form and the possibility to change whatever you need either application wide or just in a single form. As a consequence, you get even less code than in a Ruby on Rails application. The learning curve is of course steeper than the one of the Stripes framework, but this is naturally. Stripes is a thin layer above the underlying technologies. Tapestry abstracts from the underlying technology in order to provide a lot of powerful functionality.

After having explored the functionality of the framework, writing my own components, writing mixins to extend existing components, I came to the conclusion that Tapestry is one of the most innovative frameworks and probably even the best candidate for enterprise applications.

To be honest, I think he makes the initial steps slighlty more complicated than they need to be and he properly criticizes the current state of the documentation. But he reaches the above conclusions, then goes into more detail, and finally outlines some performance data.

3 comments:

Alfonso said...

About T5 defaults:
I want different form validation view, I changed Symbol "tapestry.default-stylesheet", that's great but now I want no-animation, and animation is inside tapestry.js

Is possible to change that code? or include "another" default tapestry.js? thanks

Unknown said...

Alfonso, I think you will get more interesting replies for your question if you post it at the tapestry user forum.

http://tapestry.apache.org/tapestry5.1/mail-lists.html

Alfonso said...

Lotif: thank you a lot! I didn't know about a T5 list, thanks!!

ps: check this site: http://tapestry5.ideascale.com/