Tapestry is very much unlike most other frameworks in that it doesn’t use code
generation; instead it uses a true component object model based on JavaBeans
properties and strong specifications. This gives Tapestry a huge amount of
flexibility and enables dynamic runtime inspection of the application with the
Tapestry Inspector (a mini-application that can be built into any Tapestry
application).

In addition, Tapestry applications require far less Java coding and are far
more robust than equivalent applications developed with other popular
frameworks. This is because the Tapestry framework takes responsibility for
many important tasks, such as maintaining server-side state and dispatching
incoming requests to appropriate objects and methods.

The many new features of release 3.0 mean that Tapestry is not only the most
powerful web application framework available, it is also the fastest and
easiest to adopt, regardless of whether your background is Java, Perl, XML or
PHP!

My own testing, documented in the Sept. 2001 issue of the Java Report, agrees
with other testing (documented in the Tapestry discussion forums): Although
straight JSPs have a slight edge in demo applications, in real applications
with a database or application server backend, the performance curves for
equivalent Tapestry and JSP applications are identical.

Don’t think about the performance of Tapestry; think about the performance of
your Java developers.

Tapestry is not a JSP tag library; Tapestry builds on the servlet
API, but doesn’t use JSPs in any way. It uses it own HTML template
format and its own rendering engine.

Starting with release 3.0, Tapestry includes a simple JSP tag library to allow
JSP pages to create links to Tapestry pages.

Tapestry is open source and free. It is licensed under the Apache Software
License, which allows it to be used even inside proprietary software.

Currently, no WYSIWYG editor is available for Tapestry; however, the design of
Tapestry allows existing editors to work reasonably well (Tapestry additions
to the HTML markup are virtually invisible to a WYSIWYG editor).

Spindle is a Tapestry plugin for
the excellent open-source Eclipse IDE.
It adds wizards and editors for creating Tapestry applications, pages and
components.

Of course! JBoss is free and convienient
for the turn-key demonstrations. You can download Tapestry and JBoss and have
a real J2EE application running in about a minute! The scripts that configure
JBoss are sensitive to the particular release of JBoss, it must be release
3.0.6.

However, Tapestry applications are 100% container agnostic … Tapestry
doesn’t care what servlet container it is used with and does not even require
an EJB container.

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