Tapestry book: Enjoying Web Development with Tapestry (Covering Tapestry 4.1)

How to create AJAX web-based application easily?

If you'd like to create AJAX web-based applications easily, then this book is for you. More importantly, it shows you how to do that with joy and feel good about your own work! You don't need to know servlet or JSP while your productivity will be much higher than using servlet or JSP directly. This is possible because we're going to use a library called "Tapestry" that makes complicated stuff simple and elegant.

How does it do that? First, it allows the web designer to work on the static contents and design of a page while allowing the developer to work on the dynamic contents of that page without stepping on each other's toes; Second, it allows developers to work with high level concepts such as objects and properties instead of HTTP URLs, query parameters or HTML string values; Third, it comes with powerful components such as calendar, tree and data grid and it allows you to create your own components for reuse in your own project.

However, don't take our word for it! This book will quickly walk you through real world use cases to show you how to use Tapestry and leave it up to you to judge. It is best said by Geoff Longman, a Tapestry expert and the creator of a famous Eclipse plugin for Tapestry, "this is material designed to get your feet dirty *right away* and not really intended to debate whether Tapestry is right, wrong, the best, or the worst framework for you, me, or my brother."

How this book can help you learn Tapestry?

It has a tutorial style that walks you through in a step-by-step manner.
It is concise. There is no lengthy, abstract description.
Many diagrams are used to show the flow of processing and high level concepts so that you get a whole picture of what's happening.
Free sample chapters are available on http://www.agileskills2.org. You can judge it yourself.

Chapter 1 Getting Started with Tapestry	Chapter 9 Providing a Common Layout
Chapter 2 Using Forms	Chapter 10 Using Javascript
Chapter 3 Validating Input	Chapter 11 Building Interactive Forms with AJAX
Chapter 4 Creating an e-Shop	Chapter 12 Test Driven Development with HtmlUnit
Chapter 5 Creating Custom Components	Chapter 13 Database and Concurrency Issues
Chapter 6 Supporting Other Languages	Chapter 14 Using Hibernate
Chapter 7 Using the Table Component	Chapter 15 Integrating with Struts
Chapter 8 Handling File Downloads and Uploads

A more detailed TOC is here. The following topics are not found in other books on Tapestry:

How to use work with Tapestry 4.1 with the AJAX features.
How to use FireBug to debug AJAX effects.
How to do test-driven development (TDD) with Tapestry and HtmlUnit.
How to integrate Struts with Tapestry.
How to use PostgreSQL and DBCP connection pooling with Tapestry.
How to apply the four layered architecture in a Tapestry application.

Target audience and prerequisites

This book is suitable for those learning how to develop web-based applications and those who are experienced in servlet, JSP, Struts and would like to see if Tapestry can make their jobs easier.

In order to understand what's in the book, you need to know Java, HTML and some simple SQL. However, you do NOT need to know servlet, JSP, Tomcat, HtmlUnit or Hibernate. The chapter on Struts integration does assume that you know Struts. If not, you may skip that chapter.

Download or purchase

Download free chapters	Chapters 1-4 here
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Download the complete source code in the book	source code in the book

Previous editions

The first edition covers Tapestry 3 and the second edition covers Tapestry 4.0.

About the author

Ka Iok 'Kent' Tong is the manager of the IT department of the Macau Productivity and Technology Transfer Center. With a Master degree in Computer Science from the New South Wales University, Sydney, Australia and having won the "Macao Programming Competition
(Open Category)" in 1992, Mr. Tong has been involved in professional software development, training and project management since 1993. He is a committer for the Apache Tapestry project and the author of Essential Skills for Agile Development, Developing Web Services with Apache Axis and Fast Track to Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) 5.0 Upgrade Exam.

Contact the author

If you have any comments, please send to freemant2000 at yahoo dot com.

Errata

Please check the change log. The PDF version and the current print version already include the changes.