Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Tapestry 3.0 in Hindsight
About 9 months ago I worked on a 3 month contract that developed a brand new webapp in Tapestry 3.0. I've done a lot of Struts and other home-grown frameworks. My impressions on Tapestry are:
- Highly and truly reusable component is possible in Tapestry;
- Extremely steep learning curve, and the Tapestry in Action book is a must read; Not a very good book though as it focuses too much on how Tapestry does things rather than how it can be used.
- Almost completely incompatible with other web framework such as Struts, JSP, etc.
- Almost no access to the underlying Servlet API.
- I frequently needed to dig into the Tapestry implementation source code to figure out what's going on.
- I preferred POJO and didn't like the fat class hierarchy that must be inherited.
- The lack of a MVC 2 framework seems like a step back.
- Code base is changing rapidly. Tapestry 4.0 has just been released, and the documentation is probably still a problem.
