My visit to Intelligent Works

Over the weekend, I visited snowy Ottawa, Canada to meet with Geoff Longman (creator of Spindle).

This wasn't a social trip (though it could have been as Geoff is a cool guy) ... it was a chance to meet with another team of people who are aggresively using Tapestry, and who may be needing Tapestry training in the future (or, potentially, involved in training yet more folks). There's a lot of opportunities brewing north of the border for Tapestry, for myself, and for Intelligent Works, Geoff's company.

There were several people in attendance, here's a writeup from Chris about my talk:

From: Geoff Longman <glongman <at> intelligentworks.com>
Subject: Fw: Howard's talk...
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.java.tapestry.user
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 11:36:12 +0000


We were lucky enough to have Howard pop up to visit Intelligent Works here
in Ottawa last weekend and give us a very informative (~4 hour) session
focused on Tapestry and Hivemind.

I asked Chris Justus, a consultant working with Tapestry here, to jot down
his thoughts..

Geoff

Geoffrey Longman
Intelligent Works Inc.

P.S. I agree totally, bit I must add that the Hivemind portion of the
session was equally as informative!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Justus" <cjustus <at> alceatech.com>
To: <glongman <at> intelligentworks.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 11:26 AM
Subject: Howard's talk...

> I've been working with Tapestry for 6 months, and we have been building
> an application that currently consists of about 100 tapestry pages and 50
tapestry
> components... Howard's talk was good in terms of explaining some ideas
> and concepts behind Tapestry.  Having worked with other frameworks in
> the past, I consider the idea of using the jwcid attribute a real
> solution to a very real problem of having designers and developers work
> together on an application...
>
> In addition: We are also now at the cusp of some major work in which I
> was considering using a body of 30 pages, 30 templates, and 30 class
> files as a base for 2 other areas of the application - this would result
> in the creation of 200 additional files within the project.  I spent 3
> minutes explaining our application to Howard, the internal object model,
> and the layout of our tapestry pages... In just a minute or two, Howard
> had suggested several alternatives to the plan that was going to be
> implemented, which will save us tens of hours up front, and likely
> hundreds of hours in maintenance down the road... This provides a very
> quantifiable savings on the order of tens of thousands of dollars in
> development and maintenance.
>
> Overall Howard's visit was very beneficial... Anyone doing serious
> Tapestry work would be wise to meet with Howard and get feedback on how
> they are implementing various aspects of their application...
>
> Chris
>

As usual, I enjoy talking about Tapestry (and HiveMind), especially to an audience that really gets it. I also enjoy hearing about user's business models and making suggestions about how to best use Tapestry. In fact, thinking on my feet there, I came up with some very nifty approaches that I'll summarize soon.