Good resources for building web-app in Tapestry

Question

I'm currently researching into Tapestry for my company and trying to decide if I think we can port our pre-existing proprietary web applications to something better. Currently we are running Tomcat and using JSP for our front end backed by our own framework that eventually uses JDBC to connect to an Oracle database.

I've gone through the Tapestry tutorial, which was really neat and got me interested, but now I'm faced with what seems to be a common issue of documentation. There are a lot of things I'd need to be sure that I could accomplish with Tapestry before I'd be ready to commit fully to it. Does anyone have any good resources, be it a book or web article or anything else, that go into more detail beyond what the Tapestry tutorial explains?

I am also considering integrating with Hibernate, and have read a little bit about Spring too. I'm still having a hard time understanding how Spring would be more useful than cumbersome in tandem with Tapestry,as they seem to have a lot of overlapping features. An example I read seemed to use Spring to interface with Hibernate, and then Tapestry to Spring, but I was under the impression Tapestry integrates to the same degree with Hibernate. The resource I'm speaking of is
http://wiki.apache.org/tapestry/Tapstry5First_project_with_Tapestry5,_Spring_and_Hibernate . I was interested because I hadn't found information anywhere else on how to maintain user levels and sessions through a Tapestry application before, but wasn't exactly impressed by the need to use Spring in the example.

Andri

#tapestry channel on FreeNode IRC has been useful although regrettably underpopulated. A few people including myself do frequent it and it's a good way to get through what is otherwise a framework that requires a good amount of document reading and searching – Andri

Answer 1

The sources I use are:

• the documentation itself particularly the component reference
• Howard's blog
• the wiki, particularly the howtos
• the mailing list archives (the convention is to put 'T5' in the subject for Tapestry 5 issues)
• the Jumpstart project pages
• the Chenille Kit demo for additional components

Personally, I've found that Tapestry 5 does everything a basic web app needs without Spring. There might be some specific Spring utilities you would want to pull in, but the Tapestry/Hibernate integration is very solid and easy to use. Still, the wiki has some examples of integrating the two.

I'm not sure of what you're referring to regarding sessions. It's extremely simple with T5. See this.

Sicard

Thanks Brian, very helpful. Not sure how I missed the wiki how-tos and the Persistent State guide. This should help me get moving forward with my evaluation. – Andri

Answer 2

Don't forget to check the new, improved documentation at http://tapestry.apache.org.

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