Apache News Online

25 June 2005 - Jakarta Tapestry 4.0 beta 1 Now Available

The first beta release of Jakarta Tapestry 4.0 is now available. Tapestry is a component based web application framework that provides lots of functionality with minimal Java coding, and creates an environment that support high levels of reuse. Tapestry 4.0 represents a significant advance over Tapestry 3.0. A few of our favorite changes in 4.0:

• The new 4.0 specification DTDs have been simplified.
• The syntax used for binding parameters inside an HTML template and inside an XML specification is now consistent. Both make use of the binding prefixes.
• "Friendly" URLs (that is, URLs that pack more information into the path and less into query parameters) are built in. This makes it easy to divide your application across many folders (reducing clutter), and leverage J2EE declarative security along the way.
• Listener methods are much easier and more flexible; listener parameters in the URL are automatically mapped to listener method parameters, and listener methods can return the page name or page instance to activate.
• Component parameters now just work, without having to worry about "direction".
• Applications can now have a global message catalog, in addition to per-page and per-component message catalogs. Messages not found in the component message catalog are searched for in the application catalog.
• Full, native support for developing JSR-168 Portlets has been added.
• Tapestry 4.0 makes much less use of reflection and OGNL than Tapestry 3.0; partly because there are many new binding prefixes and largely because of how parameters are now implemented.
• HiveMind services and Spring beans to be directly injected into page and component classes.
• Tapestry 4.0 includes optional JDK 1.5 annotation support (but Tapestry still works with JDK 1.3).
• Tapestry 4.0 debuts a new and much more sophisticated user input validation subsystem. Thanks Paul!
• Line precise error reporting can now display the contents of files containing errors.
• Forms can now be canceled, bypassing client-side validation logic, and invoking an alternate listener on the server-side.
• You are no longer limited to just Global and Visit; you can have as many application state objects as you like.
• The use of HiveMind under the covers means that Tapestry can be easily customized to fit your needs.
• Page properties can now be persisted on the client, as well as in the session.
• Components and component parameters can now be marked as deprecated. Component parameters may have aliases (used when renaming a parameter).

The complete list of changes is almost too numerous to enumerate Suffice to say, everything is about getting more bang for the buck; reducing the amount of Java code, reducing the complexity of templates, and simplifying (or eliminating) XML files.

Tapestry is distributed as a combined binary/source distribution, and a seperate documentation distribution.

Download Tapestry

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-- The Jakarta Tapestry Development Team

Project Info -- Apache Tapestry

Apache Tapestry is a component-based web application framework, written in Java. Tapestry is more than a simple templating system; Tapestry builds on the Java Servlet API to build a platform for creating dynamic, interactive web sites. More than just another templating language, Tapestry is a real framework for building complex applications from simple, reusable components. Tapestry offloads much of the error-prone work in creating web applications into the framework itself, taking over mundane tasks such as dispatching incoming requests, constructing and interpretting URLs encoded with information, handling localization and internationalization and much more besides.

Releases can be downloaded from http://tapestry.apache.org/download.html

Project Website	http://tapestry.apache.org/
Programming Languages	Java
Categories	web-framework
Mailing Lists	http://tapestry.apache.org/mail-lists.html
Bug/Issue Tracker	http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAPESTRY
Project Management Committee	Apache Tapestry

Access to the source code:

Browse	http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/tapestry/
SVN Direct	http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tapestry/