complex components

Hello,

Being a newbie to Tapestry I chose to get my feet wet by implementing a 
little, however reasonably complex component - a calendar which should 
be fully localized and provide a way to move forward and backward 
monthwise, etc. I already have it implemented in struts/tiles, and 
wanted to see how Tapestry fares.

As a first resume, I must say that Tapestry has a rather steep learning 
curve - mostly caused by the multiple files one has to handle for each 
and every little item (like implementing a foreach loop or a conditional 
branch). Tiles tags are  definitely simpler to handle - and scripting a 
JSP (or Velocity) is the easiest.

To some extent I can see this is due to the complex logic involved in 
the problem. The calendar cannot be layed out statically in HTML, with 
individual items replaced by business logic results - it requires a 
nested loop with conditionals inside. Expressing this type of logic in a 
template language is simply a pain (after all, this is what we have 
programming languages for).
Doing this in a html template language like Tapestry has almost only 
drawbacks - the HTML becomes completely unmaintainable, both for humans 
and for design tools, and runtime efficiency is also questionable.

OK, after ranting, heres my immediate questions:

1. Is there a recommendation for situations as the above? Is there a way 
to directly write parts of the component to the response stream from a 
Java method when the logic becomes too complex?

2. I need to also dynamically determine some tag attributes (i.e., 
"class=" style attributes). In a JSP, I can write something like <td 
class="<%=byBean.getStyle()%>">. How is this done with tapestry?

thanks,
Christian Sell



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