Tapestry is an open-source framework for creating dynamic, robust, highly scalable web applications in Java. Tapestry complements and builds upon the standard Java Servlet API, and so it works in any servlet container or application server.
Tapestry divides a web application into a set of pages, each constructed from components. This provides a consistent structure, allowing the Tapestry framework to assume responsibility for key concerns such as URL construction and dispatch, persistent state storage on the client or on the server, user input validation, localization/internationalization, and exception reporting. Developing Tapestry applications involves creating HTML templates using plain HTML, and combining the templates with small amounts of Java code. In Tapestry, you create your application in terms of objects, and the methods and properties of those objects -- and specifically not in terms of URLs and query parameters. Tapestry brings true object oriented development to Java web applications.
Tapestry is specifically designed to make creating new components very easy, as this is a routine approach when building applications.
Tapestry is architected to scale from tiny, single-page applications all the way up to massive applications consisting of hundreds of individual pages, developed by large, diverse teams. Tapestry easily integrates with any kind of backend, including JEE, HiveMind, Spring and Hibernate.
It's more than what you can do with Tapestry ... it's also how you do it! Tapestry is a vastly productive environment. Java developers love it because they can make Java code changes and see them immediately ... no redeploy, no restart! And it's blazingly fast to boot (even when files change). Designers love it because Tapestry templates are so close to ordinary HTML, without all the cruft and confusion seen in JavaServer Pages. Managers love it because it makes it easy for large teams to work together, and because they know important features (including localization) are baked right in. Once you work in Tapestry there's no going back!
Tapestry is released under the Apache Software Licence 2.0.
You are currently reading the Tapestry 5 project site. Tapestry itself is broken into several modules:
| tapestry-annotations | A few Tapestry annotations that may be used with non-component classes. |
| tapestry-core | The core implementation of the Tapestry framework, including all the primary built-in components. |
| tapestry-hibernate | Integration with the Hibernate Object/Relational Mapping framework. |
| tapestry-ioc | The Tapestry Inversion of Control Container. |
| tapestry-spring | Integration with Spring. |
| tapestry-test | Tapestry test utilities. |
| tapestry-upload | Tapestry file upload component. |
Or, you can start with the screencasts, which give you a better idea about how Tapestry fits together.
Tapestry is, of course, an open-source project, with all the work coming from unpaid volunteers. That being said, our rough timeline is as follows:
Tapestry 5 has inspired a number of people to create third party libraries, providing a mix of new components and new and improved integrations.
| Name | Author | Description |
| equanda-tapestry5 | Joachim Van der Auwera | Components useful for building enterprise applications. Includes Accordion, Tabs, Formtraversal. Amongst other things, these focus on easy input of data without the need for a mouse. |
| Godcode Components | Chris Lewis | A mixed collection of components providing simple but time-saving functionality, as well as more exotic ones; built on top of the prototype and script.aculo.us javascript libraries. |
| JumpStart | Geoff Callender | A "living tutorial" in the form of a base Tapestry application ready to be expanded and customized. |
| InterLDAP | Linagora / Francois Armand | LDAP content management system for non tech users. |
| Shams Examples, Components | Mohammad H. Shamsi | A set of Tapestry 5 Examples, Tutorials, Components, and Documents for beginners. |
| T5Components | Sven Homburg | Ajax-enabled components based on Prototype and Scriptaculous. |
| tacos-seam | Igor Drobiazko | Intregrates with JBoss Seam. |
| tapestry5-acegi | Robin Helgelin | Integration with the Acegi path-based security framework. |
| tapestry5-treegrid | Gabriel Landais | Combination tree navigation and data grid, based on sstree. |
Tapestry 5 is an all new code base, written from the ground up to take Java web component development to new levels of productivity.
This new release removes many limitations of Tapestry 4:
Tapestry is built using Maven, which makes it really easy to download the source and build it yourself, either the whole project, or just one single module.
Better yet, you can pull down Tapestry modules from the central Maven repository.
The use of Maven has let us move with great speed, providing preview releases and snapshots.
Snapshots are intermediate versions of releases. As I'm writing this, the most recent preview release is 5.0.2 and the current snapshots are for 5.0.3-SNAPSHOT. Maven keys off the -SNAPSHOT suffix and handles the dependency specially. It knows that snapshot releases can change frequently, so it will keep checking (at least once a day, maybe more often) to see if there's an updated version of the snapshot.
A nightly build process on Tapestry's continuous integration server creates new snapshots emevery night/em.
Snapshots don't go in the central Maven repository (that's reserved for full releases). Instead, they go into the Tapestry snapshots repository at http://tapestry.formos.com/maven-snapshot-repository.
To access this repository, you may add -DremoteRepositories=http://tapestry.formos.com/maven-snapshot-repository to the command line when running Maven.
Your best bet is to use the quickstart Maven archetype to create your initial Tapestry project; it generates a full project directory, including a POM that links to the Apache snapshots repository.
Documentation on this site usually refers to the latest snapshot ... that is, it is usually ahead of the last official release. In some cases, it is written as if the snapshot release is stable; if documentation refers to version 5.0.x and that doesn't work, try 5.0.x-SNAPSHOT.
Tapestry is designed to be extremely scalable in several dimensions:
One core architecture decision in Tapestry exists to service many of the above goals (and others that are harder to describe). Static Structure, Dynamic Behavior
In Tapestry, the structure of any particular page is static. This is necessary for several reasons, most importantly because Tapestry pages are pooled. Creating a Tapestry page is an involved process, because the page object is simply the root of a large tree of other objects including user provided components, many kinds of structural objects, template objects, and others. Creating a new page instance for each request is simply not scalable.
Instead, Tapestry pools pages. Once created, a page instance will be stored in a pool for that particular type of page, and reused in later requests. An incoming request, the result of a user clicking a link or submitting a form, will be processed by some server within a cluster, and will use some page instance within the page pool. Because page instances are static and uniform across instances and servers, Tapestry can use any available page instance, or create a new one as needed.
Tapestry does not need to store page instances inside the HttpSession. At most, it stores a smattering of persistent field values from the page, but not the entire page instance. This lean use of the HttpSession is key to Tapestry's very high scalability, especially in a clustered configuration.
In some Tapestry-like frameworks, such as Faces and Wicket, the page structure is more dynamic, at the cost of storing much, much more data in the HttpSession.
This static structure is not so limiting as you might think. With different kinds of conditional and looping components, and the ability to "jump out of the flow" and render components in an arbitrary order, you will not find Tapestry to be rigid ... anything but!
An issue plaguing previous versions of Tapestry 4 (and earlier) was the lack of a clear delineator between private, internal APIs and public, external APIs. The fact that your code would extend from base objects but that many of the methods on those base objects were "off limits" further confused the issue. This has been identified as a key factor in the "steep learning curve of Tapestry" meme.
With the clean slate of Tapestry 5, we are being much more ruthless about internal vs. external.
First of all, anything inside the org.apache.tapestry.internal package is internal. It is part of the implementation of Tapestry. It is the man behind the curtain. You should not ever need to directly use this code. It is a bad idea to do so, because internal code may change from one release to the next without concern for backwards compatibility.
Tapestry has been plagued by backwards compatibility problems with every major release. Tapestry 5 does not even attempt to be backwards compatible to Tapestry 4. Instead, it lays the ground work for true backwards compatibility going forwards.
Tapestry 5's API is based almost entirely on naming conventions and annotations. You components are just ordinary Java classes; you will annotate fields to allow Tapestry to maintain their state or to allow Tapestry to inject resources, and you will name (or annotate) methods to tell Tapestry under what circumstances a method should be invoked.
Tapestry will adapt to your classes. It will call your methods, passing in values via method parameters. Instead of the rigidness of a fixed interface to implement, Tapestry will simply adapt to your classes, using the hints provided by annotations and simple naming conventions.
Because of this, Tapestry will be able to change internally to a great degree without it affecting any of the application code you write. This should finally crack the backwards compatibility nut, allowing you to have great assurance that you can upgrade to future releases of Tapestry without breaking your existing applications.