don't know if it's what you are looking for but you can always override renderComponent also in BaseComponent decorating the component template with some additional html e.g.
/* (non-Javadoc) * @see org.apache.tapestry.BaseComponent#renderComponent(org.apache.tapestry.IMarkupWriter, org.apache.tapestry.IRequestCycle) */ public void renderComponent(IMarkupWriter writer, IRequestCycle cycle) { if (showComponent) { writer.begin("div"); renderIdAttribute(writer, cycle); writer.appendAttribute("class", getMyCSSClass()); renderInformalParameters(writer, cycle); super.renderComponent(writer, cycle); } else { writer.begin("span"); renderIdAttribute(writer, cycle); } writer.end(); } in this example, if the component is inheriting from BaseComponent , super.renderComponent(writer, cycle) , wil render the template part of the component within some other directly java manipulated html. But it's not 100% clear to me what you mean with "manipulation/usage of templates within JAVA" as in tapestry templates are "manipulated" within java, meaning that you can change a template output quite a lot using existing or custom components and ognl parameters binding. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]