Some Tapestry Stories

A ways back, I published a call for anyone interested in free Tapestry 5 Laptop stickers (that call is still open!). You get the stickers, I get a story. Here's a few highlights, in no particular order:

Robert B., USA

The SC Medicaid Web Portal enables doctor's offices and hospitals, using the Web, to enter and submit claims for patients enrolled in Medicaid in South Carolina.

Steve E., Singapore

We're producing an on-line matching system for Non Deliverable Forwards (NDFs) in the currency finance market for a brokerage firm. (Or I guess in layman's terms, a gambling system!)

Kejo S., Switzerland

We are working now since almost 3 years with T5 and we created an application platform for ABB with it and really a lot of other projects. I think we wrote already far more than 1 million lines around your framework! Often your framework is fun and sometimes pain, but it's always amazing how lean and clean your source is! Overall I think it is the best frontend framework in the java ecosystem right now! Great Work!

Ivan K., Belarus

We just started new project on t5 - online collectible card game.

Michael L., Germany

We started a Tapestry5 project to build our extranet application, that links into the ERP to provide realtime information to stake holdersaand supporting internal workflows. We're just at the beginning and implementing more and more stuff. However, we looked at different Web-Frameworks but Tapestry5 simply rocked!

Greg P., Australia

I'm using Tapestry to create liftyourgame.com. A site that allows people to achieve their goals.

Szymon B., Poland

We use Tapestry 5 in our economic information service neurobiz.pl. It gives users access to the information about businesses operating in Poland and registered in National Court Registry.

Dominik Hurnaus, Austria

Working on a large CRM system for an automotive customer.

James S., USA

My team and I are working on a web-based interface for a fuzzy lookup and matching engine we've developed. I've also started messing around Tapestry for a few of my personal projects. I started using T5 a couple months ago, and so far I'm loving it.

Nenad N., Serbia

I am working with 5 other developers on mobile portals developed with Tapestry for multiple clients.

Dragan S., Macedonia

I was a GSOC developer and now I'm trying to do new cool stuff with Tapestry like websocket integration with node.js and rabbitmq.

Volker B., Austria

Our project is a dealer management system which supports dealers and workshops of the VW Group's brands and the Porsche sports car brand in all sorts of operational processes in a modern and flexible way ... in our company I think there are about 80-100 people that are using Tapestry.

Daniel J., Canada

Assessment dashboards for schools in southwest SK, Canada

William O., USA

We are working on a number of cool Facebook apps using Tapestry. One's called My Social Rankings ( mysocialrankings.com ), and the other is called Blingville (blingville.com).

Peter P., Slovakia

We are developing web applications for broker companies using Tapestry 5, and its great to develop with Tapestry.

Pablo N., Argentina

We are using Tapestry for http://www.squidjob.com (migrating out of GWT). The site is THE place for finding service providers for anything.

Joost S., the Netherlands

Yanomo is time tracking, project management and invoicing software for the rest of us. Use it and "You know more" :)

Alexander G., Belarus

We have been using Tapestry for about 6 years in our projects. Our current project is web administration console for RadiumOne Display (www.radiumone.com) platform. We are very happy with our stack consisting from Tapestry5+Spring+Hibernate+jQuery.

As usual, I see a lot more Tapestry adoption outside the US; I wonder if its about programming culture ... or about Tapestry localization support? I tend to see the Europeans developers as having more freedom to work with less mainstream technologies ... but when I ask them about this, they always seem to think that it's the US developers who have that freedom. I guess the grass is always greener.

Tapestry 5.3 Maven Archetype

After struggling most of yesterday day, I finally have the Maven archetype working.

Use the command:


mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://tapestry.apache.org/


This points Maven at the Tapestry-specific Archetype Catalog, you want the first option ("Tapestry 5 Quickstart Project"), then choose the fourth option ("5.3-beta-20").

I need to fix something broken in the CSS of the archetype; otherwise it's working nicely, and demonstrates a bunch of new features in Tapestry 5.3; it also makes use of up-to date features, such as using the @Import annotation (instead of the now removed @IncludeStylesheet annotation), and some Ajax features on the first page.

I may switch things around to make use of Twitter's Bootstrap CSS stylesheets.

Here's a full session of creating the application and getting it running; it took less than 30 seconds:

Things You Didn't Know About Tapestry 5.3

I missed the JavaOne Comparing Web Frameworks talk and was appalled at some out-of-date information in it ... though reviewing his slides, it looks like he talked about Tapestry 5 but showed out-of-date Tapestry 4 examples. With Tapestry 5.3 ready very soon now (and less than a year after 5.2) it seemed like a good time to share some cool things about Tapestry:

Tapestry Release Compatibility

Tapestry 5.3 will be available soon; and for the majority of users, the upgrade is simply a matter of changing the version number in their pom.xml or build.gradle. Release compatibility was certainly a major headache from Tapestry 3 to Tapestry 4; and there is admittedly no direct upgrade path from Tapestry 4 to Tapestry 5 ... but Tapestry 5 was created from the ground up to prevent the kind of pain experienced in prior Tapestry releases. To wit:

• Services and dependency injection allows a fine-grained, not monolithic, approach to evolving the framework
• Metaprogramming of components allows new behaviors to be gradually introduced, bypassing the fragile base class problem
• Tapestry 5 has always carefully separated internal interfaces (which is not guaranteed to be stable between releases) from stable public interfaces. Literally, in packages named .internal. so there's no guesswork about what's public and what's internal
  

Tapestry Makes It A Snap To Work With Hibernate and JPA

Tapestry has built-in modules for supporting both Hibernate and JPA. You get lots of stuff for free, including automatically configuring entities (just put them in the right package), easy transaction management, and smart encoding/decoding of entities ... Tapestry knows how to convert back and forth between entity instances and primary keys when building URLs.

Tapestry Works Great With Spring

Tapestry integrates very cleanly with Spring. You can inject Tapestry services into Spring beans, you inject Spring beans into Tapestry services and components.

Tapestry Plays Well With Others

Tapestry doesn't care if you have other servlets running in the same web application. You can fine-tune how it builds URLs, or even put Tapestry in a box so it doesn't collide with other servlets or filters. You can also easily share information with other applications.

Tapestry Likes HTML5

Starting in Tapestry 5.3, <!DOCTYPE html> works perfectly in Tapestry.

Tapestry Hot Deploys

Tapestry (since 2006) has had live class reloading; change a template or a Java file and Tapestry reloads it instantly. And since its integrated into the framework, Tapestry can be very efficient about loading and reloading resources. Since 5.2, Tapestry has also live reloaded (most) service implementations. So code away! Tapestry can keep up with you.

Tapestry Loves Ajax And JavaScript

Tapestry (currently) bundles Prototype and Scripaculous, but you can swap that out for jQuery quite easily. Tapestry has most common Ajax use-cases built in, and uses a uniform approach to rendering full pages, or individual snippets. Tapestry does a lot of other tricks, such as combining your individual JavaScript files into a single JavaScript stack (on the fly, at runtime). In addition, Tapestry has an extensible framework for organizing your JavaScript and initialization code (partly on the server-side, partly on the client-side).

Tapestry 5.3 adds vastly improved reporting of server-side exceptions, along with an easy way of presenting alerts to users.

Tapestry Is Polyglot

Tapestry doesn't care if your classes are written in Java, Scala or Groovy ... if it's bytecode, that's all that counts.

Tapestry Is Fast And Getting Faster

Tapestry has been getting faster and leaner with each release. 5.2 introduced page singletons (where a single page instance can be safely shared across many threads, even though it contains mutable fields) and 5.3 boosts the performance in a bunch of ways large and small. Tapestry 5.2 scored right at the top of this performance comparison, and Tapestry 5.3 is around 30% faster.

Tapestry Has The Best Feedback Of Any Framework, Period

Tapestry's approach to feedback goes far, far, far beyond any other framework or toolkit; it goes beyond the comprehensive exception report page and extends to small concerns throughout the framework:

• Tracking what the framework is doing, and why, at all times
• Including extra checks for common errors and building real messages that identify what went wrong and how to fix it
• Built-in pages to allow simple application monitoring

Tapestry Really Gets Localization

Localization support isn't an add-on; it's built-in from the ground up. Tapestry allows templates and other assets to be localized automatically: just follow the naming convention and Tapestry uses the correct file. Tapestry has localized messages for 14 languages and counting.

Tapestry Is Customizable

Tapestry's architecture, based on lots of individual services and dependency injection, means that almost any service or other logic in Tapestry can be overridden. Don't like how Tapestry builds URLs? Replace it seamlessly. Dont' like how Tapestry reports exceptions? Replace it! Tapestry is designed specifically so that you can augment or replace any behavior in the framework.

Tapestry is a Meta-Programming Monster

And I mean that in a good way; Tapestry has powerful support built-in for meta-programming at the services layer and at the component layer. Tapestry lets you get in and modify method invocations and field access, without getting your hands dirty with the ugly bytecode details. All the cool things Tapestry does with naming conventions and annotations is wide open for application-specific things. Meta-programming provides a critical alternate avenue of code reuse.

Tapestry IoC Works Great On Its Own

Tapestry's IoC library works great on its own, separate from the web framework itself. That includes live class reloading, meta-programming capabilities ... even a simple job scheduler.

... that's enough for now. The point is that Tapestry has a lot going on ... to paraphrase Philip Greenspun:

Any sufficiently complicated servlet or JSP web application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Tapestry.

... and half is being very generous!

Tapestry: Feedback!

I often say that the three cornerstones of Tapestry are Simplicity, Consistency, Efficiency, and Feedback. Although all four of these concepts work in concert with each other, it's Feedback (keeping the developer informed when things go wrong) that is one of the most distinguishing features of Tapestry, and that's only gotten better in Tapestry 5.3.

Exception Reporting

First off, there's Tapestry's default exception report page. When an exception is thrown during a request, most often a coding error in a Tapestry page or template, Tapestry moves heaven and earth to report the exception properly. For example, in Tapestry it is not allowed for a component sub-class to define a parameter with the same name as a parameter from a base class, as this creates an ambiguity. When this situation occurs, an exception is thrown from deep in the bowels of Tapestry:

That's a start, but it's not great feedback; you'll be doing a lot of work to figure out what was going on in Tapestry leading up to the exception, and from there, figuring out how to fix it; there's lots and lots of noise in the repeated stack traces (caused by nested exceptions). However, you can see a glimmer of hope in those first few lines, the ones that start Registry [ 1], Registry [ 2], ...

Tapestry goes to a lot of trouble to track what is going on during the handling of a request; it keeps a stack of operations which describe what Tapestry is doing at any particular time. There's still a lot of internal details, but the gist of it is that Tapestry needed to create an instance of the ParameterConflictDemo page, and hit an error while doing something with the ParameterSubClass component (sorry for the ugly names, I'm using examples from Tapestry's internal test suite).

However, parsing apart the console output is NOT what a Tapestry developer does; instead they'll get all those details, and more, from the Tapestry exception report page:

Ah, much better. We're seeing the essential details from the stack of exceptions; we're seeing the associated template snippet that defines the parameter with the exception, we're seeing that operations stack neatly formatted. We see that stack of operations here as well, formatted for readability. Scrolling down, we see the stack trace of the deepest exception, formatted:

The frame in bold blue? That's a frame in the application's package, rather than code in inside Tapestry. That highlighting is very useful for letting the developer quickly figure out if the cause of the exception is a minor problem inside their code, or something more involved that shows up inside the Tapestry framework code.

Scrolling further down, we start seeing even more relevant information: all the details of the incoming request:

... well, you get the idea. Where a framework that takes feedback less seriously might give you a simple stack trace and leave the process of determining the underlying cause entirely up to you (after all, you have a debugger, right?) Tapestry fully embraces the importance of feedback: giving you all the information you need as soon as you need it (and yes, you don't have to show all that to your end users). More than that, there's attention to detail throughout Tapestry to provide real exception messages. For example, if you provide a component type name that doesn't match some component, Tapestry responds with a detailed message, including a list of all the known component types:

Again, Tapestry doesn't want you to have to put on your detective's hat to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. It's providing all the details you need right when you need them.

Live Application Introspection

What if your problems are more subtle? How do you track down other issues, like performance problems or memory utilization? Well, Tapestry provides some introspection to address those questions as well. Tapestry 5.3 adds the Page Catalog, a special page for providing information about what pages have been loaded into memory, and a few details about how big they are, and how long they took to assemble:

Likewise, the Service Status page gives you feedback about the services defined inside the Tapestry Inversion of Control container, helping you determine what services exist, and in what state:

Deep Details

And what if you are tracking down something even more subtle? Well, by enabling some logging, Tapestry will output that operations trace as each operation starts and finishes. It's an avalance of information, much of it about instantiating services ... below is a log of just what happens when you first startup a Tapestry application, before it even processes it's first request:

Because Tapestry operates lazily, instantiating pages and services only as needed, even more happens when the first page request arrives:

Conclusion

In any case, the point of all this is that Tapestry provides you with the key tool, information, at all stages of development. This is central to Tapestry as a tool to be used: a framework that gets in the way, that makes any aspect of development harder or slower than it should be, is a framework that should not be used ... and I feel quite strongly that Tapestry is a framework meant to be used!