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If you're used to developing web applications using servlets and JSPs, or with Struts, you are simply used to a lot of pain. So much pain, you may not even understand the dire situation you are in! These are environments with no few safety net; Struts and the Servlet API have no idea how your application is structured, or how the different pieces fit together. Any URL can be an action and any action can forward to any view (usually a JSP) to provide an HTML response to the web browser. The pain is the unending series of small, yet important, decisions you have to make as a developer (and communicate to the rest of your team). What are the naming conventions for actions, for pages, for attributes stored in the HttpSession or HttpServletRequest? Where do cross-cutting concerns such as database transactions, caching and security get implemented (and do you have to cut-and-paste Java or XML to make it work?) How are your packages organized ... where to the user interface classes go, and where do the data and entity objects go? How do you share code from one part of your application to another?

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As we'll see in the following pages, Tapestry lets you code in terms of your objects. You'll barely see any Tapestry classes, outside of a few Java annotations. If you have information to store, store it as fields of your classes, not inside the HttpServletRequest or HttpSession. If you need some code to execute, it's just a simple annotation or method naming convention to get Tapestry to invoke that method, at the right time, with the right data. The methods don't even have to be public!

Tapestry also shields you from most of the multi-threaded aspects of web application development. Tapestry manages the life cycle of your page and components objects, and the fields of the pages and components, in a thread-safe way. Your page and component classes always look like simple, standard POJOs.

Tapestry began in January 2000, and it now reflects over fifteen eighteen years of experience of the entire Tapestry community. Tapestry brings to the table all that experience about the best ways to build scalable, maintainable, robust, internationalized, and Ajax-enabled applications. Tapestry 5 represents a completely new code base (compared to Tapestry 4) designed to simplify the Tapestry coding model while at the same time extending the power of Tapestry and improving performance.

Getting the Tutorial Source

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