Allan Saddi's projects blog

I often heard about the Tapestry framework in passing, but I never really paid heed to it. It wasn't until I read a minor blurb about it in Rod Johnson's J2EE Development without EJB that my interest was finally piqued. Basically, it stated that Tapestry was inspired by the WebObjects' Page/Component model, something I am somewhat familiar with. Something I look back at with a certain nostalgia.

WebObjects was my first experience with a "real" web application framework. Before then, I was working with CGIs and my own cobbled-together Python modules. After proving to myself that I could indeed run it on my collocated FreeBSD server (an unsupported platform by WebObjects... not to mention by Java as well, back then), I started dabbling in Enterprise Objects/WebObjects. Eventually, I wrote a number of applications, though mostly internal.

It also gave me a chance to brush up/re-learn Java. Though WebObjects was heavily tied to the OpenStep way of doing things, just under Java (i.e. the collections were not standard Java Collections, among other things), which I didn't really like.

Anyhow, I moved on from WebObjects, preferring to do my Java web development with "frameworks" like Hibernate and Spring. But WebObjects had some neat ideas, and anything WO-inspired will always catch my attention. (For example, in Python world, there's the Modeling framework, which looks promising.)

Anyway, no where in the Tapestry site will you actually see the word WebObjects, which is probably why I glanced over it before. But having played with Tapestry now, I see the influence. And not only that, with annotations and automatic state management, Tapestry has taken the Page/Component model to another level. (And the upcoming Tapestry 5 looks even more exciting.)

But, the thing that made WebObjects development bearable was WOBuilder, the graphical, WYSIWIG page/component editor. I haven't looked at the IDE plugins for Tapestry yet, but that level of integration seems to be missing. (Editing a page/component involved editing 3 files — the class, the spec, and the html template. WOBuilder actually edited all 3 in a relatively sane manner.)

I'll probably play with Tapestry a bit more, and I've already built a template web applications for myself. Whether or not there's a decent Tapestry plugin for Eclipse will probably decide whether I'll base any future projects on it. Though you can omit the spec file using annotations in the Java class, editing the template files by hand seems a bit daunting. In fact, it reminds me, not so fondly, of my homebrew Python templating engine, HTMLpp.

Though Tapestry 5 templates seem a lot easier to write...