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Saturday, January 07, 2006

Phew! Tapestry 4.0 is final!

Tapestry 4.0 (final) has been released. This is a great relief to me, because I really think I could explode, or at least spontaneously combust, if this didn't happen.

I'm exceptionally proud of this release; to some degree, we've rewritten Tapestry from the inside out. The new structure, based on HiveMind, makes Tapestry exceptionally extensible, and performance appears to be better than Tapestry 3.0 (so much less reflection going on). More importantly, the coding model has improved quite a bit. Component parameters now just work ... no fumbling with "direction", listener methods are really flexible and easy to use, the validation framework is much, much simpler, and the annotation support (still optional in 4.0) is very succinct and code-focused.

We're already doing some planning for Tapestry 4.1 which better not take two years ... I'm hoping more like 6 - 9 months. I have several tasks on my plate:

  • A fast, useable, productized integration test suite (that can be used to test applications)
  • Convert to a Maven 2 build
  • Rework form support to eliminate the rewind phase
  • Remove the need for pages and components to extend from Tapestry base classes

Meanwhile, time to sit back and see what people make of this new release.

13 comments:

Unknown said...

Rewind phase was what turned me off tapestry.
I hoped it would be solved in 4.0

Anyway, congratulations on a huge release !

Anonymous said...

Great news!
Congratulations!!

Avah said...

Congratulations!

Can't wait to use this final version... I really enjoyed using the pre-release versions, and getting Tapestry 4.0 as a final, stable release just feels like a treat. :)

Unknown said...

Congratulations! I switched from T3 to T4 two weeks ago - And I was amazed that it feels so much better! Just curiuos: Why do think having page classes derive from a common-base class is a bad thing? I'd anyway always have my own app-specific base-page.

Matt Raible said...

Any chance of getting the ibiblio repository updated? I took care of 3.0.3, but it looks like 4.0 doesn't have any transitive dependencies defined.

http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/tapestry/tapestry/3.0.3/tapestry-3.0.3.pom
http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/tapestry/tapestry/4.0/tapestry-4.0.pom

Anonymous said...

Congrats! Tap rocks!

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, always hard to get a release out the door. Thanks for the hard work.

Anonymous said...

Well done Howard. I've been stuck in struts land too long now I wish I had the choice of using Tapestry at the moment.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for all the hard work Howard. Web development really is fun again.

Unknown said...

The rewind fase is going away? YES!
*rejoicing in the streets*

Anonymous said...

Although I appreciate all the great stuff packed into 4.0 I hope 4.1 takes a smaller amount of time to develop too.
Make a list of 4.1 goals and stick to them :) It's always tough when you want to pour in all your great ideas. Thank you for Tapestry 4.0.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations! I am now finally switching from php to java and Tapestry was my choice. You won't trust me, but it's similar (but more complex) to my own "framework" written in php. Although I see documentation should be improved. It's not simple for beginners to start. I had to combine TIA book, Enjoying web dev with tapestry and google searching, but some thorough user manual (with user comments) would be best.

Dan said...

Congratulations to the entire Tapestry team! I adopted Tapestry 3.x over a year ago, migrating away from Struts and have never looked back. I'm upgrading my current application base to 4.0 and finding out everything you promised your team would deliver is there -- and more!