IntelliJ Diana Growls

That was a surprise: I downloaded IntelliJ 8 preview (Diana) and after it compiles, it uses Growl (the centralized Mac notification app) to inform me that its completed. Nice.

I'm also experimenting with using the Mac OS X look and feel (rather than Alloy). I had used Alloy in the past for performance reasons but IntelliJ 8 feels a bit faster. In addition, it's nice having the menu bar be where it's supposed to be ... the Mac look and feel puts it on the Mac menu bar, but Alloy puts it, Windows-style, in each top-level frame.

Nearly ready for 5.0.12

Tapestry 5.0.12 will be available pretty soon; I'm working on one very important component that's tricky to get Just Right: AjaxFormLoop. This is a component that allows you to dynamically add and remove rows (or divs, list items, whatever) that represent detail objects under a master object ... think line items in an invoice. The trick, of course, it to make it useful as-is, and to make it easy to customize it. It takes a bit of state-management gymnastics to make everything work just right, but it's almost there.

I expect to get this finished up in the next couple of days along with other work, and create a 5.0.12 release early next week.

Tapestry 5 with NetBeans

At NFJS Boston last month, I ran into Alex Kotchnev. We had a number of chats about Tapestry and spurring wide adoption. I'm still working on some of those ideas. He's a NetBeans user whereas most of the documentation assumes Eclipse or IDEA. He's posted a blog about use Tapestry in NetBeans; specifically, using the Maven support to avoid typing the dreaded Maven project creation incantation.

Tapestry for Nonbelievers at InfoQ

Renat and Igor's long awaited article, Tapestry for Nonbelievers is finally available. Check it out!

My only real criticism is that, had they focused on Hibernate, some of the code that switches back and forth between entities and entity ids would be handled automatically by tapestry-hibernate.

They're promising to follow through with more articles. I welcome it!

Improvements to the Tapestry 5 Tutorial

I spent some time yesterday revamping the Tapestry 5 Tutorial; you can see the updates at the nightly build site.

In short order we turned the Address object into a Hibernate entity, and stored it in a MySQL database, then used a Grid to show the added Addresses. Later improvements to the Tutorial will show editting and removal of Addresses.

I think the correct reaction to this would be "Dude, where's my code?". The application code for this app is so small you'd think something was missing. But that's what's Tapestry is all about ... providing the structure so that the framework can do the busy work.

I also updated some of the existing screen shots to show the "error bubbles" style of client-side validation that's been in T5 for quite some time.

People have been pining for a 5.0.12 release, but I'm glad I've been holding it back; I've been having a chance to fix bugs, and finding many annoyances as I work on a client project. Working in earnest on a project is always the best way to find the rough edges, and the end result is much more polished.

I think I must be a harsher critic of Tapestry than most; I frequently add bugs along the lines of "when I screw up, Tapestry should tell me how to fix it".