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I’m moving my apps from Struts to Tapestry as an alternative to JSF. Tapestry is a fantastic tool that’s rapidly gaining momentum in the open source marketplace. The way it’s put together, it’s just begging for a company to step up and provide killer tools to support it.
I currently use a great little plugin called Spindle, which automates several Tapestry tasks, but it would be fantastic if MyEclipse had Tapestry support that integrated or augmented what Spindle does.
For example, Spindle has its own XML and HTML editors that focus on Tapestry only. MyEclipse’s XML editor far surpasses Spindle’s, so I end up using two editors, depending on the task at hand. If Spindle support could somehow be rolled in to Tapestry’s editors, that would be amazing.
Also, Tapestry’s framework seems custom-built to apply a WYSIWYG page designer to it. Since MyEclipse has a great designer already, it would be very nice to use it for Tapestry pages. Seems like theres a ton of Tapestry developers out there that would love to see a builder of some kind.
If the request for Tapestry support grows we will definately look at it and maybe a partnership with the Spindle developer as we are never keen are re-creating the wheel.
I too would like to see the integration of Spindle for Tapestry integrated into MyEclipse. We started with Struts on a very large project, over 1,000 JSPs, now we are converting to Tapestry pages and reusing Tapestry Java Web Components (JWC). It takes a little longer to learn Tapestry over Struts, but for our developers that know HTML better than JSPs any ways we found Tapestry is the way to go.
It would be great to have a property editor for the JWCs that have been included in the page specifications. This feature would be nice from both the visual HTML/Template editor and the XML/Page Specification editor.
Also a drag-and-drop pallette of JWCs that are included in the libraries used by the application and the ones created in the application for the visual HTML/Template editor would be great!Thank you!
Eric
Personally, I have done over two projects with Struts, Tiles, and JSTL, but only went through tutorials with JSF. Now that I have developed over a dozen Tapestry components and reused them through out our application along with the components that are available through open source; I will probably not go back to the other frameworks.
1) I really like the seperation of logic from the presentation, so that web page designers can modify the page’s look and feal with out breaking the dynamic inclusion of the Tapestry Java Web Components.
2) You can use the Tapestry framework to produce any dynamic XML output; XHTML, HTML, WML, and etc..
3) The expression language OGNL can dynamically create Objects, utilize static methods & constants, and call any public method in a Object.
4) There is flexability in the framework where you can explicitly define your components in the page specifications or you can implicilty define them in the page’s template file.
5) You can define properties in your page specifications and write abstract method signatures in your abstract page class and the framework will create a concreate object with JavaAssist at run time. This helps reduce the coding.This are a few things I have grown to like about Tapestry.
Eric
Sounds like a very powerful framework… I am hearing good things about JSF as well right now, but haven’t gotten a chance to do a sample app with it. A few people using it have said they like it for the most part, but said there is a learning curve.
I’ve been a fan of Struts for a long time and have successfully deployed 3 major projects with Struts. That being said, I’m moving my whole project base to Tapestry. I’ve known for some time that the world was moving beyond Struts with frameworks like JSF and Tapestry available. Plus, everything takes so long to put together in Struts. It’s URL based vs page based and has virtually no component model and no event model. I evaluated JSF and realized that it was almost a “new version” of Struts. Quite complex, to the point of requiring a sophisticated tool in order to work with it. I then realized that this whole technology stack (Servlets / JSP / Taglibs / Struts / JSF) has become a quivering tower of convoluted technology. Since I’ve grown up with Servlets and JSP, the whole stack is easy for me to understand, but I just added a former ASP developer to my team and he was blown away by the complexity. JSF/Struts doesn’t really give you a good abstraction or mental model to hide the complexity. We evaluated Tapestry and quickly realized that not only is it simple (just a Servlet-based template framework) but it is very sophisticated with a great mental facade, easy event model, and fantastic component library support. We’re now able to do in minutes what would take hours in Struts. Some things we do routinely in Tapestry were major headaches in Struts. Plus, our whole application is completely component based with the code feeling more like GUI code than HTTP Web app code. Very good framework, though it does take some “unlearning” if you’re from the Struts camp. For more info on my choice and the history that goes with it, check out my Blog:
card,
Its funny you wrote this… a coworker and I were JUST having this conversation this morning and my mentallity is slowly learning towards “get rid of Struts, get rid of WebWork, get rid of JSF… lets start again” because these technologies are getting SO generic, SO complex that not only the learning curve, but maintennence required on a large scale app done with them is a nightmare…I think Tapestry is the “whole new approach” That I”ve been looking for… do you have any good resources/links/etc? How do you like the Eclipse Tapestry plugin? (spindle I believe its called).
Guys, if we worked with the Spindle author to integrate it… would this suite your needs, or are you looking for more ‘Tapestry Support’, and if so… what else would you want that Spindle doesn’t do?
@support-rkalla wrote:
Guys, if we worked with the Spindle author to integrate it… would this suite your needs, or are you looking for more ‘Tapestry Support’, and if so… what else would you want that Spindle doesn’t do?
That would definitely be a good start, and you could also provide some more incentive to further and possibly faster development of Spindle as well.
There is also an other plugin building on top of Tapestry, you might also consider that as well.
Also it should be researched if there is a need for Spring to Tapestry related integration support IDE features…
Actually I think, that Spring should be taken into acount whenever you integrate other lightweight technologies, and checked if the IDE can help somehow in integrating Spring and another technology and/or if the IDE can help in configuring the integration between Spring and that technology. Of course this is beside configuring that particular technology itself.
Just my 2cents…
Regards,
Robert Varga
