RE: This Tapestry stuff is hard.

I want to thank Phil and Nick for their responses to my last e-mail, 
they cleared up some of my questions and it was nice to know that I'm 
not the only one with problems in my Tapestry initiation, misery loves 
company :-)

After talking with the guys that introduce me to Tapestry and reading 
some posts in the mailing list it seems to me that only a handful of 
people really grok Tapestry. The others just code by example, that is, 
they can be productive fairly quickly with Tapestry by following the 
examples provided, but if they have to do something for which there 
isn't an example there are SOL.
But maybe I'm wrong, who among you guys feel that really understand 
Tapestry? How much time and effort did it take?

My main problem is that every time I find an answer, another bunch of 
questions pop up, dragging me into a endless spiral of confusion.

Example :

After trying unsuccessfully to combine two components to make a list 
paging component I turned my attention to the existing Table component 
in the contrib package. After a brief moment of euphoria (It seemed I 
actually accomplished something) the reality kicked in.

1 - The table component creates non bookmarkable URL's. There is no 
way to access directly a page somewhere in the list. In the Vlib 
application there is a way to create bookmarkable URL's but I wasn't 
able to incorporate this functionality in the Table component.

2 - The table component creates a Session on use, this is probably 
related to point 1 somehow, but I find this weird. One rule that I 
always try to follow when developing web apps is to try to delay the 
creation of sessions as much as possible. A paging component doesn't 
seem enough of a reason to create a Session, maybe in the Tapestry 
world things work differently.

3 - So far I'm having no luck embedding existing components (Images 
and form components) inside a Table component, looking at the example 
in the workbench what I'm trying to do seems possible but I'm failing 
miserably.

4 - I can't seem to find a easy way to define the number of items in a 
page, shouldn't this be a parameter of the Table (or the TableRows) 
component?

The above example pretty much summarizes my Tapestry experience so far, 
it seems like I'm playing with Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls.

Fortunately not all my experience is bad, there are things that I 
really like about Tapestry.

- The clear separation between Java code and HTML is great.
- The way pages communicate is awesome.
- Localization of pages is extremely easy (very important for my work).
- I just love the Border component and what can be done with it.
- The exception reporting is excellent.

I truly believe that there are more hidden pearls in the Framework 
that are just waiting for me to find them, if only I had a map.

Jorge Chandra



_______________________________________________
No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
Introducing My Way - http://www.myway.com


-------------------------------------------------------
This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
Welcome to geek heaven.
http://thinkgeek.com/sf