Well, I've read Patrick's posts and I also have to say that I share his
opinion.
I am very productive with Tapestry thesedays, component-way is terrific, but
I'm not evangelizing it throughout my company because I recall how much time
I spent on it, and knowing that some java web developers out there didn't
even know that instance variables shouldn't be used in a servlet due to
concurrency, I really doubt they would handle Tapestry well.
I would happily trade many of Tapestry features just for simplicity, just to
be more newbie-friendly. As Patrick said, it is great tool for advanced
developers, but for newbies, I just don't know.
But, these are all 3.0 impressions, and I realize that 4.0 is on it's way
out, so I anxiously want to see how things will look now. One positive thing
I could say already about it : page/component specs definetly are more
newbie friendly.
Starting from:
<property-specification name="foo" type="java.lang.String"/>
to
<property name="foo/>
is really huge win. Same for parameters. Not only that it's shorter, but
"property" is far more understandable to anyone that
"property-specification". New listeners that return IPage are also great,
since it gives a clue what this method is supose to do (otherwise one could
accidentaly set cycle.activate(page) many times for various pages in complex
method). Now if only old listener shapes would dissapear, thus not confusing
newbies.
Like so many, I would also like to point that rewind phase is probably the
worst simplicity-killer. Just looking at how much I had to think about
render/rewind cycle when doing "create/edit" page, I get really scared for
newbies. PageRenderListener, rewind checking, Hidden listener for loading
the entity etc...One really has to do it carefully.
Some other simplicity/newbie killers:
- usage of abstract keyword
- usage of exceptions for request flow (PageRedirectException and
RedirectException)
- pooling pages/components in general
- Tapestry distribution project dir (why doesn't it have only typical "lib",
"src", "docs" directories); this is especially true for 4.0-beta when people
want to check it and report bugs before final
- default binding values
...and some others...
I also feel bad that developer community isn't a bit bigger/active, compared
to really flourishing user community. Maybe it's because of total
refactoring in 4.0 and need to keep pace with HiveMind.
Don't want to sound pessimistic though. I really wait for 4.0, to see how
will things look then.
Cheers,
Vjeran
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
