If you want to "sell" Tapestry to management, here are some points to
consider:
1) The Java "ecosystem" is far more mature than the .Net ecosystem --
there are more experienced programmers, more tools, more libraries,
etc. It's relatively easy to find a library that does what you need,
especially as free and open source.
2) Team productivity:
- Tapestry lets UI designers concentrate on creating and editing web
pages in the tools they're accustomed to using. You don't have
mixtures of code and layout -- they're cleanly separated. (If you use
Eclipse, the Spindle plugin also checks the syntax of all the
tapestry annotations in the HTML files. There's no good static
checking for JSP files, it's more like "run it and see if it breaks.")
- Tapestry lets coders concentrate on code in regular Java files.
You get the full power of whichever development tools you choose to use.
- Tapestry delivers incredibly rich information when something goes
wrong. (You not only know which line in which Tapestry file, but you
get a full stack trace, often with line numbers.) Most of the time,
it leads you right to the bug
- Pages are "live" during development -- edit a page, hit reload in
your browser, and your changes are there. For deployment, just switch
on the cache and it all becomes blazingly fast.
- Reusability is easy. If you start using something in multiple
pages, it's easy to pull that out and make a common component.
3) The community:
- The full sources to Tapestry are freely available, which makes
debugging (and development) much simpler than working with a closed-
source system.
- If you don't like a feature in ASP.NET, tough. If you don't like a
feature in Tapestry or need a new one, there's a community behind it
and you have great access to its author. (Howard wrote a key
component of our production system in less than a day, during a class.)
I could go on and on. I've been working for a year on a major project
for Autodesk (and it's in beta now), and we had our choice of any
technologies at the start. We went wit Tapestry and have never looked
back. The application has grown and changed as the business needs
evolved, and keeping the UI look and feel current with the business
needs has been one of the easiest parts of this project (which is a
very serious workflow engine.) I'm in the middle of a complete
reorganization of the UI (about 100 screens) into a new workflow, and
it's taking me about a week. Try re-organizing a serious database-
driven 100-screen ASP.Net app completely in a week.
The project manager and I were reviewing the app this morning, and I
was literally fixing bugs and adding features faster than he could
enter them into the bug tracker. (And I'm not one of those walk-on-
water programers; I'm pretty good, but my specialty is instructional
design and architecting systems. I'm not even a heavyweight Tapestry
guy; I've been focusing on the back-end of the system for half of the
year.)
If your management is serious, they'll look at the whole picture --
cost, support, the availability of talent and tools, etc. Under those
conditions, Tapestry becomes very attractive.
...Richard
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