Molindo Techblog

In the last weeks I started to have a look at different web frameworks and came across Tapestry5. Having watched the screencasts on the website, I began to like it straight away. Although still in development (the release is planned in fall 2007), it offers some nice features. The most impressive one is that you do not have to restart the servlet-container to apply changes in java files. But for me personally, the features I appreciate the most are that you don’t have to bother with jsp-specific stuff (such as <% useBean="..." %> – Ugh!) and it lets you get rid of the servlet mapping stuff in the web.xml. That’s nice isn’t it? I also read some posts claiming that Apache Wicket already provides such features. I started reading the Wicket docs, but stopped when I saw that there’s a need to inherit from a Wicket base-class and to define servlet-mappings in the web.xml – as stated above, I don’t like too many manual servlet-mappings and I also prefer dealing with POJOs.

After playing around with Tapestry by implementing the screencasts and the tutorial, I tried to inject Spring2 managed-beans into a Tapestry5 app. I found a load of examples/tutorials online, but they either dealt with tapestry4 and/or spring1.2.x. There also is a tutorial on the Tapestry site from its creator Howard Lewis Ship. Unfortunately, he missed pointing out that it is vital to add another dependency, the tapestry-spring library. Worth mentioning is, that the tapestry-spring dependency differs from the tapestry-spring.jar available on the project page which I used at first. It took me quite a while to find out what’s wrong until I found a hint in the tapestry-mailing-list. A user there suggested to add the tapestry-spring dependency to your maven2 pom.xml. After including the library, a simple @Inject was enough to inject a spring-bean into the tapestry-class. The dependency should look as follows:

<dependency> <groupid>org.apache.tapestry</groupid> <artifactid>tapestry-spring</artifactid> <version>${tapestry-release-version}</version></dependency>

The hacks I did with Tapestry5 made me to get in touch with Maven2 for the first time. Together with the eclipse-plugin, it was very easy to add dependencies to the project and to build and pack the application. That’s of course only the tip of the iceberg, and I’ll definitely have to get a bit more into maven – as it really looks like it offers some nice features. And also I have to prove if Jelmer Kupurus’s statement is right or not

Enough for now, I’d love to receive some comments with your experience with Tapestry5 and Spring integration!