I'm in Bellevue, WA this weekend for the Pacific Northwest Software Symposium (a No-Fluff/Just-Stuff event) and I've been caught off-guard with a handful of questions regarding Tapestry. Then, half-way through one of my sessions, it occurred to me that the reason for those questions might have something to do with the fact that Mr. Tapestry himself, Howard M. Lewis Ship, is also speaking at this show (his presence at the back of the room tipped me off).
I used to be a big fan of Tapestry. I've written apps with both Tapestry 3 and Tapestry 4...and had a great time doing it. But I've not worked with Tapestry in quite some time. There are several reasons:
- I simply haven't had much opportunity to use it on any projects. For the past 2-3 years, I've been on projects where Tapestry wasn't an option...either because a web framework choice had been made before I joined the project or, on one project, it was a .NET project.
- I didn't find that there was a vibrant Tapestry community. I can't say for sure if that's still true, but 2-3 years ago, it seemed like it was just Howard and a handful of other folks.
- Other web frameworks caught my eye and have kept me plenty busy enough to not re-explore Tapestry.
- Honestly...while I liked Tapestry, I didn't feel good about the not-so-POJO development model. And, although I'm not a member of the He-Man XML-Haters Club, I did think that Tapestry's XML configuration was a bit much.
Howard caught me after a session yesterday and wanted me to take another look at Tapestry. I was too exhausted to look at anything last night, so I just went to bed. But this morning, my central-time brain woke up plenty early enough in this pacific-time world to give Tapestry 5 a once-over.
My initial reaction: It's good stuff! The XML is gone and annotations are in. Pages are no longer abstract and no longer extend base Tapestry classes--they're POJOs.
So...very good work, Howard! I might have to come up with some excuse to try Tapestry 5 on one of my personal projects to see if the niceness of the simple examples scale up to a more real application.
