Re: Re: Plastic: An ASM wrapper for Tapestry 5.3

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Eugene Kuleshov <[email protected]> wrote:
> Howard,
>
>  You may want to start with providing a 5 minute howto tutorial or a cookbook.
>  Learning a new framework by the javadocs is not exactly trivial task...

It's early days for Plastic yet; eventually the docs will be there,
part of the Tapestry documentation.  Right now, the unit test suite is
the best documentation, beyond the Javadoc:

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/tapestry/tapestry5/trunk/plastic/src/test/groovy/org/apache/tapestry5/plastic/



>
>  regards,
>  Eugene
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Howard Lewis Ship <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'm not sure how many of you are aware of Tapestry
>> (http://tapestry.apache.org/) ... it's a sophisticated Java web
>> application framework.  At its core, it does some sophisticated
>> meta-programming on Java classes, transforming them at load time to
>> give them a number of new capabilities and such. This has built up in
>> Tapestry 5 over the last few years, using a wrapper around Javassist.
>>
>> However, Javassist is poorly documented, supported and maintained.
>> It's also repeatedly caused problems with code compiled for JDK 1.6.
>> Several months ago, I decided to see if I could port my highest level
>> abstractions from Javassist to ASM (in fact, the move to higher
>> abstractions goes back a year or more).
>>
>> The result is Plastic.  Plastic is a layer on top of ASM.  It entirely
>> hides the ASM APIs.
>>
>> The JavaDoc is here (from Tapestry's continuous integration build):
>>
>> https://builds.apache.org/hudson/job/tapestry-trunk-freestyle/ws/trunk/build/documentation/javadocs/org/apache/tapestry5/plastic/package-summary.html
>>
>> (start with PlasticManager and PlasticClass)
>>
>> Plastic is used in two ways:
>>
>> 1) To create new objects, typically proxy objects implementing one or
>> more interfaces
>>
>> 2) To instrument existing code, modifying its implementation
>> incrementally as classes are individually loaded
>>
>> In most cases, you add behavior by introducing new interfaces and new
>> methods and by applying advice to existing methods.  For fields you
>> may inject values into the field, or outright replace access to the
>> field with delegation through a supplied FieldConduit.
>>
>> You also get efficient access to methods, regardless of visibility,
>> via MethodHandle, as well as efficient access to fields (which are
>> required to be private) via FieldHandle.
>>
>> Finally, there's a nice DSL, InstructionBuilder, used for providing
>> the implementation of a method directly.
>>
>> Although Plastic is part of Tapestry, it is entirely usable outside of
>> Tapestry; it's a sub-project of Tapestry with no dependencies (it even
>> uses a repackaged copy of the ASM 3.3.1 source).  Tapestry 5.3,
>> including Plastic, is currently in an alpha state.
>>
>> I'm generally quite pleased with how Plastic has come out, and I'd
>> like to share it with others with a similar interest.
>>
>> Tapestry's inversion-of-control layer uses Plastic to generate various
>> kinds of proxies, to handle everything from just-in-time
>> initialization, to more advanced design patterns (such as
>> chain-of-command), to crazy stuff such as allowing method invocations
>> to return placeholder objects while computations execute on separate
>> thread.
>>
>> In Tapestry's web layer, Plastic is used for additional types of
>> proxies, and for the property expression language (Tapestry compiles
>> template expressions such "user.name" directly to bytecode for optimal
>> execution).
>>
>> In the next few weeks, I'll be converted the component class
>> transformation part from the Javassist layer to Plastic.
>>
>> I'm very interested in comments and suggestions concerning Plastic.
>>
>> --
>> Howard M. Lewis Ship
>>
>> Creator of Apache Tapestry
>>
>> The source for Tapestry training, mentoring and support. Contact me to
>> learn how I can get you up and productive in Tapestry fast!
>>
>> (971) 678-5210
>> http://howardlewisship.com
>>
>>
>> --
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>>
>>
>
>
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>



-- 
Howard M. Lewis Ship

Creator of Apache Tapestry

The source for Tapestry training, mentoring and support. Contact me to
learn how I can get you up and productive in Tapestry fast!

(971) 678-5210
http://howardlewisship.com

-- 
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