Summary

Definitions

-Overview-

Illustration 1

Illustration 2

Illustration 3

The Framework - a flyby

Conclusion

Biography

Resources

Overview
Since the advent of Servlets and JSPs, one of the biggest problems that has plagued the Java web development community is the separation of presentation and content. There has been various attempts to solve this problem. Some use a template approach that introduces a whole new set of tags intermixed with some HTML and even some programming constructs. While other solutions take it to the other extreme where everything is done in code. Tapestry's unique solution to the problem is to keep the presentation in HTML (or other standard markup language), define the content in Java and tie the two together with an XML specification; and a grouping of these three pieces makes a Tapestry component which is the logical unit of a Tapestry application.
A Tapestry component, technically referred to as JWC (Java Web Component), is a web component that can be composed, instantiated, configured and aggregated to compose other components. A text field shown in a browser via a Tapestry application is an instance of a JWC. And so is the web page itself (a specialized JWC, technically referred to as "Page", as you will see later in this document), which may be composed by aggregating instances of other non-Page JWCs. Tapestry comes with a toolbox ("library") of JWCs that can be used right off the shelf. A JWC need not necessarily have to be a web interface component; it can be a control component like the Foreach component in Tapestry's core library. In addition, Tapestry framework provides a strong foundation for the developer to build custom JWCs (beyond the scope of this document) without the painful, error prone, grunt, plumbing work that is inevitable in building a web application. A Tapestry application's presentation tier is built using these JWCs.
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