#tapestry5

Conclusion

Part 17 - Conversion to Tapestry 5.4

Part 16 - Java 8 compatibility

When Java 8 came out, it seemed to me the most stable release ever.  I had no issues upgrading any of my software to Java 8, and the new features such as Lambdas and Streams were a wonderful additions.

Unfortunately, it took over a year and a half to release a stable version of Tapestry that supported Java 8.  Why?  Nobody just cared! T5.4 alphas / betas supported Java 8, but not production versions.  All that had to be done is to upgrade the bundled ASM package, but nobody bothered to do it in over a year.

Part 15 - Ajax table issues and other Ajax missing features

As I was working with Ajax, especially tables / grids, it became obvious that Tapestry’s implementation is not very modern.  This isn’t really addressed in T5.4 as features remain the same.  Ajax table looks dated, just has one silly-looking pager on top, and if you want to customize it, good luck.

Tapestry claims many features, and there are indeed many, they are just mostly based on very old JavaScript that hadn’t been upgraded in years.

Part 15 - Ajax table issues and other Ajax missing features

As I was working with Ajax, especially tables / grids, it became obvious that Tapestry’s implementation is not very modern.  This isn’t really addressed in T5.4 as features remain the same.  Ajax table looks dated, just has one silly-looking pager on top, and if you want to customize it, good luck.

Tapestry claims many features, and there are indeed many, they are just mostly based on very old JavaScript that hadn’t been upgraded in years.

Part 14 - yuicompressor dependency issues

This is a plea to all projects, including Tapestry 5:  If you are going to be including any dependencies in your own .jar, use “jar-jar links” or something similar to rename internal dependencies so they don’t clash with the original work.

Tapestry likes to compress JavaScript, which is good.  Unfortunately, it uses yuicompressor library that’s bundled with an old version of Rhino, which conflicts with everything else we are trying to use.  I had to resort to packaging my own yuicompressor with jar-jar links to be able to run any of the code.

Tapestry is not the only offender to this.  GWT is a big one, among many other open-source projects.

Please, don’t do this, publish a list of your dependencies via ivy/maven instead.

Part 13 - Tapestry-security

How to secure web applications has always been a non-trivial task.  Tapestry has a module, called Tapestry-Security that simplifies things and integrates Apache Shiro with Tapestry.

As I was starting to use Tapestry-Security in-depth, however, the ugly parts of Tapestry-IOC integration came reared its ugly head again.  

Apache Shiro is usually configured with shiro.ini file, which is a simple text file that presents a Java-beans-based standard configuration, is easily understood, and is used by many people.  All the examples within Shiro are presented using this configuration file.  Unfortunately, Tapestry-Security discards this configuration method in favor of Tapestry-IOC-based method, which is poorly documented and very hard to understand.  As more security requirements were added, it became a battle to figure out just what combination of annotations, code, and where to put it all.  None of these efforts paid off, and like anything with Tapestry-IOC, crazy errors were a result of seemingly simple modifications, and were impossible to figure out.  Since Shiro/Tapestry-IOC/Tapestry-Security combination is rarely-used one, there was no one to help with the setup, and the more rigorous security requirements had to be abandoned in this context.

Part 12 - Tapestry5 design - One Class per Page vs. JSF possibilities