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General Questions

How do I get started with Tapestry?

The easiest way to get started is to use Apache Maven to create your initial project; Maven can use an archetype (a kind of project template) to create a bare-bones Tapestry application for you. See the Getting Started General Questions page for more details.

Even without Maven, Tapestry is quite easy to set up. You just need to download the binaries and setup your build to place them inside your WAR's WEB-INF/lib folder. The rest is just some one-time configuration of the web.xml deployment descriptor.

Why does Tapestry use Prototype? Why not insert favorite JavaScript library here?

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In rare cases a choice is necessary between fixing bugs (or adding essential functionality) and maintaining complete backwards compatibility; in those cases, an incompatible change may be introduced. These are always discussed in detail in the Release Notes General Questions for the specific release. You should always read the release notes before attempting an upgrade, and always (really, always) be prepared to retest your application afterwards.

Note that you should be careful any time you make use of internal APIs (you can tell an API is internal by the package name, org.apache.tapestry5.internal.... Internal APIs may change at any time; there's no guarantee of backwards compatibility. Please always check on the documentation, or consult the user mailing list, to see if there's a stable, public alternative. If you do make use of internal APIs, be sure to get a discussion going so that your needs can be met in the future by a stable, public API.

Why are there both Request and HttpServletRequest?

Tapestry's Request interface is very close to the standard HttpServletRequest interface. It differs in a few ways, omitting some unneeded methods, and adding a couple of new methods (such as isXHR()), as well as changing how some existing methods operate. For example, getParameterNames() returns a sorted List of Strings; HttpServletRequest returns an Enumeration, which is a very dated approach.

However, the stronger reason for Request (and the related interfaces Response and Session) is to enable the support for Portlets at some point in the future. By writing code in terms of Tapestry's Request, and not HttpServletRequest, you can be assured that the same code will operate in both Servlet Tapestry and Portlet Tapestry.

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