Thanks to Howard Lewis Ship for his introductory presentation on Tapestry. He covered alot of interesting ground during the two hours. Tapestry is an advanced open source web application framework that goes far beyond the capabilities of Struts and goes head-to-head with Java Server Faces (JSF). Unlike JSF and Struts, Tapestry does not make use of tag libraries but instead adds attributes to the standard html tags which then get processed. This greatly facilitates cooperation between web application developers and web designers as the pages can easily be edited in your favorite HTML IDE - no custom tags/scriptlet to get in the way of the artist. Tapestry includes a validation framework and very robust error handling that pinpoint the offending line of code in a page! Tapestry comes with a set of pre-packaged controls that exceed those provided by JSF. While Java Server Faces is not exclusively tied to HTML, only html widgets are currently supported. This contrasts with Tapestry which can be used with any valid xml document such as SVG, WML, etc. Howard also covered Spindle, an Eclipse plugin, which facilites development with Tapestry. If you are investigating JSF or looking for something more powerful than Struts you should definitely checkout Tapestry.

Slides

Tapestry Presentation

Abstract

This session will be a rough and tumble introduction to Tapestry.  We'll use Spindle, the Tapestry plugin for Eclipse, to create simple web pages. Along the way, we'll see how Spindle and Tapestry both assist you in quickly finding and correcting your errors. We'll also see how Tapestry simplifies web application development by letting us focus on our code, not on all the HTTP and Servlet details. Finally, we'll see a bit about how Tapestry's server- and client-side input validation framework ties into the overall picture.

Speaker

Thanks to CSC for the facility and Addison Wesley for the Door Prizes!