On 28.10.2009 08:36, Inge Solvoll wrote:
Before going with Tapestry I have read lot's of comments and powerpoints and blog discussions and web framework comparison talks and all of them had a single major drawback about Tapestry, no matter if version 3 or 4 or 5. It was supposedly very hard to learn, but once you would get into it there should be no limits. :)I would love to see a positive and helpful response to this request. His approach might annoy a few people here, but I encourage you to take this kind of thing seriously. I believe there are a lot of people feeling the way Argo feels about the framework, and he does hit a few good points on the way, about good examples and documentation.
If one has previously worked with php and asp, then learning the whole java stack and the specifics of Tapestry will require at least a month of hard experimentation and reading. Some of you suggest mixins (while he may not know what a mixin is), some of you suggest 3rd party components (some of which have almost zero documentation on installation and usage).
I think that the tapestry site really really needs a demo where one can see a page or two from a full-blown application with complicated user interaction and rich web interface and a complete up2date tutorial on how would one build that page.
Jumpstart is great for learning the working of various components, but when one is a beginner he will need a full set of relevant tutorials and guides how to build something that is complicated.
I have a similar misshap as Argo has these days, I have to code a semi complex interaction that mimics an OLAP database and drag-and-drop modules for reporting with pivot tables and I have to build it in under one week with ASP.NET and MySQL. And the last time i have tried a Microsoft development tool was when Visual Basic 1.0 was Beta and it came on three 5.25" installation floppy disks. So I think that I fully understand Argo-s worries, being in a similar position.
I could send you a link to the latest Tapestry application that we are building which does have several complicated dynamic pages and ajax, but there is almost no documentation in English at this point and there is a huge database schema that sits behind the application whch makes it harder to delve into. It will open-source once we decide on the licencing model and finish the release requirements, so I wouldn't put it completely in public, but I can send the code of some of the more complicated web pages to anyone that is interested in learning, just send me an email.
Once I have some spare time I promise that I will try to strip them apart from unnnecessary bulk and setup a showcase demo site.
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