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Monday, February 08, 2010

Commited to Tapestry

Quite a few people have commented on Ten Years of Tapestry, many to note some of the many other great projects being built with Tapestry as a foundation.

We keep a list of tutorials and extensions on the Tapestry home page, with many other sites noted on the wiki (here and here).

Meanwhile, a particular comment from Peter Rietzler was so compelling, it deserves to be top level, so here it goes:

Although our web application uses Tapestry we are using all the Tapestry support stuff far beyond the web tier - I thought that it might be interesting to see that the Tapestry framework is pretty useful in other environments too :)

First and most noteworthy Tapestry IOC got our first choice as dependency injection container, both because of its simplicity and the power of contributions and service overrides. We are building a highly modular (and massively unit- and integration- tested) application where Tapestry IOC's concept of modules and contributions has proven a perfect choice for us. I've written a couple of blog entries about this issue about a year ago when we were searching for a light-weight alternative to OSGi: Is OSGi going to become the next EJB ? and How to Design Software for Flexibility, Reusability and Scalability without loosing KISS principles!

We wrote and contributed Tapestry extensions for popular unit testing frameworks: Unitils (included in next release) and the Spock framework.

Additionally we are heavily using Tapestry services (such as pipelines and chains) in our core services.

Even the type coercion infrastructure has proven very useful for us. We developed a quite powerful Groovy DSL for Enterprise Data Mediation which is targeted to non-developers and we use Tapestry type coercion (with some extensions) tightly embedded in our DSL to free our e-business managers from the burden of providing correct types.

Our whole project heavily relies on small contributions of commands that are instantiated in high volumes at runtime and need environmental stuff injected - another point where Tapestry IOC has proven to be very useful.

Cheers and many thanks for your awesome work,

Peter

btw: I've forgot to mention that we presented our module system with Tapestry IOC at the Austrian Enterprise Java User Group meeting along with another talk about Spring DM and OSGi held by Sam Brannen last autumn.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nice posts by Peter. I agree with many of his thoughts. Some weeks ago I started the series Tapestry IoC: Modularization of web applications without OSGi.