Summary
Definitions
-Overview-
Illustration 1
Illustration 2
Illustration 3
The Framework - a flyby
Conclusion
Biography
Resources
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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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