Another great Tapestry quote

This one is from Jason Cox and showed up in the Tapestry user mailing list with the title Nothing short of beautiful :

At 11am this morning, the first version of our Web Portal prototype was completed. I'm sad to say that this is an Intranet project and so won't be usable for marketing Tapestry and for confidentiality reasons I cannot even name the company at this time. However, it is a very large company with an international presence, and the portal I am developing is going to be used mostly by managers and up to senior level executives.

I just want to give a big thanks to the members of this list, which I have been reading constantly.

On overview, though I doubt they will be examples of Tapestry best practices, the templates, specifications, and java code has all been very elegant. Not because I am such a stellar developer, but because Tapestry lends itself so well to MVC design. Once I got it in my head to fully implement all aspects of the portal in Tapestry, it took me about 3 days. There was far less effort than I've had using Struts or the custom framework we had at my last job.

The only low point is that I am not convinced that I particularly like how Tapestry handles Javascript. It just slams it all into the page. No cached references to .js files like you typically have in standard HTML and even JSP's.

On the other hand, I was able to perform some neat little tricks that would have been slightly more cumbersome using traditonal JSP development, including dynamic comments that only appear when certain conditions occur. Realistically, they're just there for reference if someone messes with the HTML template, but I didn't want them to actually appear on the page, so I nested them inside the error blocks.

Implementing my own Border web component was incredibly elegant, and if I would just take the time to properly 'HTMLize' it I can actually hand it off to a web designer in the future. Though I am still looking at dynamic menu generation and some other features that will make it less static. Not a high priority right now. What's the most amazing is that it actually works seamlessly with the ridiculously obtuse javascript files that most of our Intranet sites use to build their header and footer.

Now the next challenge is implementing a content management system that will also use Tapestry as its outward facing framework.