Hi,
I've been in Tapestry training for the past week, have really enjoyed
it, and picked up some useful stuff along the way (if you've been
seeing "Clemson University" run across the tweet box, that was
connected with us). Mr. Lewis-Ship really gave a broad and deep
overview of how Tapestry works (thank you!), and I thought I would
share some of the things I personally got out of it in hopes it would
help someone else learning the framework.
* Activation and passivation in Tapestry work in concert -- can't have
one w/o the other.
- If you populate an instance variable on the page in onActivate,
return it back in onPassivate
- PageLink asks for activation context using onPassivate if you
don't supply context parameter
- May have to @InjectPage and supply what gets passivated beforehand
in some cases.
* Play around with page URLs and see what happens
- What happens if you don't supply any activation context?
- What happens if the activation context is garbage?
- What happens if the activation context points to something you
shouldn't be able to access?
* Do work in baby steps -- just try to get *something* visible and
work from there.
- Components should default as much as possible to aid this process.
* JavaScript is very sensitive about syntax and loose about semantics
-- watching Firebug debugger religiously during development of
non-trivial JS almost a must.
- Any client-side IDs need to be passed down to client, or use
well-known class names on the client.
* Ajax: All about what happens when, and breaking up responsibility
between server and client.
- Treat URLs going down to the client as immutable.
- Can "bake in" data into the URL that will be passed back up as a
parameter on the handling method server-side using "context" parameter
on *Link, Form, ProgressiveDisplay components.
- Keeping that in mind, what if you want to make an AJAX request
with dynamic number of parameters and/or with values not known at
render-time? Use "parameters" object parameter on
Tapestry.ajaxRequest() to add query parameters to the AJAX request.
* If you're banging your head against the framework, it's okay to step
down to raw elements and do things manually.
- Request service (and @RequestParameter on method parameters) and
template property expansions (e.g. ${blah}) a good bridge between page
class and raw elements (prop expands for render-time, request parms
for submit-time).
* Whatever tools you use, know them inside-out.
Thanks,
Les Baker
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