Updates to Tapestry @ JavaForge

I decided to move the home page for Tapestry @ JavaForge back to my web site, so I can control things a bit easier. Tapestry @ JavaForge is a small, but growing, collection of Tapestry extensions, designed to work with 4.0.

These projects are useful as themselves, but are also quite interesting as examples of how extensible Tapestry 4 is. One adds a new binding prefix, "prop:", that uses generated bytecode, not reflection, to read and update bound properties, and is designed as a replacement for OGNL in many simple situations. This is useful when performance really counts.

The second extension adds a new type of property persistence, "flash", that is similar to the Ruby on Rails flash storage ... data is stored on the server, but only until the next time it is used to render the page. The documentation explains how to combine the flash with the really easy redirect-after-post supported in Tapestry 4.

In other words, small but significant extensions to Tapestry's base functionality. And the configuration needed to make use of these? Drop the JAR onto the classpath. That's what HiveMind is all about. All the necessary configuration is encapsulated inside each JAR's hivemodule.xml deployment descriptor. It Just Works.

As importantly, there is now a Maven 2 repository for this work, http://howardlewisship.com/repository/. With a little work (described on the home page), you can set up your local Maven to pull down these files, just like any other dependency.

I'm a little better than luke-warm about Maven 2; it's a huge advance over Maven, but it has stability problems, much out of date documentation, and even more generated documentation with very little content. I guess it is encouraging people to guess and experiment, which I simply don't have the patience for right now. However, I do think there's a lot of promise in Maven 2, so I'll be sticking with it for a bit. I still indent to transform HiveMind 1.2 and Tapestry 4.1 into Maven 2 projects.