NoFluff Raleigh/ Coding Galore

Did a quick trip down to Raliegh, NC for the Research Triangle Software Symposium, where I gave the Tapestry intro and Tapestry components sessions. I've been ahving bad allergies lately, and my throat was raw even before I started my three hours of sessions ... fortunately, Justin Gehtland was in the audience and got me some tea, but even so, it was very, very rough. Coughing until I was light headed. Losing track. Getting confused. Even so, I got some pretty rave complements after the session (thanks!).

Interesting crowd, with a few very seasoned Tapestry folks sitting in. Once more, a product company building on Tapestry that I haven't heard of before. The same question ("how does it compare to JSF") and my now stock answer ("Tapestry is designed to allow you to solve problems by easily creating components").

When I wasn't talking, I was coding, putting together more and more annotations (and tests --- 100% code coverage, by the way). You can now specify your component paraemeters via annotations, and your assets, and your beans (though you are slighly limited). Just @InjectMeta and @InjectScript left to go, and maybe @Description.

I got home and added a lookup system for resolving component classes from component types. That is, if you don't provide a component class in the XML, Tapestry will search for component classes in a list of packages you provide, before defaulting to BaseComponent. Just realized that I need to make component specifications optional in the same way that page specificaiton are optional (!) ... since most things you have to specify in XML can now be specified in annotations.

And that's the lesson ... moving away from XML. There's still many Tapestry things that can't (I think) be expressed as annotations, but many, many of the common things can be, and as I'm writing and documenting these annotations, I'm thinking that's the right approach. Side-lining (or at least, reducing) the XML in Tapestry is now a Good Thing (even if it's going to give Geoff fits!).

There's been some push back, the question why is this good? Well, the thing I'm most envious about in the Ruby space is the focus on the code (something brought into high relief by Ruby On Rails). Annotations are the same concept, expressed in Java terms ... there's the code and nothing but, with the annotations wired directly into the code. I am beginning to like!