Tapestry 4.0 Documentaton

Just a public thank-you to Pierre-Yves Nicolas, the first person from the larger Tapestry developer community to start providing component reference documentation. As I said, this is a chance for people to get noticed and make a difference ... it's largely just documentation and some more bug fixes between now and a final 4.0 release.

Subversive Tapestry

A big move this weekend ... Tapestry source code has moved out of Apache's CVS repository and into the Apache SVN (Subversion) repository. Let the refactoring commence!

In addition, Tapestry 4.0-beta-5 was released, continuing our style of releasing every week or two. This release really cleans up the way Tapestry generates client-side element ids (they are now XHTML compatible, so no more embedded dollar signs or leading underscores). The JavaScript generates to support client-side validation has been cleaned up and simplified ... its much shorter and much more readable now.

People keep asking when Tapestry 4.0 will be final; right now, it's just bug fixes none of which seem too terrible, and documentation, which is more of a problem. I'm still hoping for release candidates in the month of September.

Tapestry 4.0 progress and such

HiveMind 1.1-beta-3 is out, which makes it easier to build Tapestry 4.0. That would be nice because I've been trying to get people to help with the documentation, and they need to be able to build things first.

I've also updated the Tapestry QuickStart Tutorials, bundling HiveMind 1.1-beta-3 and the latest snapshots of Tapestry 4.0-beta-5.

I've been fixing lots of little bugs in Tapestry 4.0, mostly stuff related to client-side JavaScript. There's some issues with the compliance of the HTML generated by Tapestry, Tapestry (beta-4) often generates ids that include the '$' character. For example, when a form contains a loop, the element ids will be 'textfield', 'textfield$0', 'textfield$1' (in beta-4). Now the same sequence will be 'textfield', 'textfield_0', 'textfield_1'. In addition, much of the client-side JavaScript has been changed to use document.getElementById() rather than document.form-name ... including accessing of form elements (which now render an id attribute as well as a name attribute).

There's still much to do with Tapestry 4.0 before it hits a release candidate, and balancing that work with my clients (not to mention my move to Portland, Oregon) has been challenging.

Meanwhile, I've been using Subclipse 0.9.32 and it's seeming a bit more stable than the .30 version I was using. It's about time for Tapestry to move over to SVN ... we already took the vote, and have just been waiting for a "quiet time". The fact that CVS has been behaving badly at apache.org just makes the urgency of the move that much more plain.