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Summary: From the creation of new components to integration J2EE
Review: Howard M. Lewis Ship is the creator and the principal architect of the Java software Tapestry. In Tapestry In Action, Ship also draws upon his more than fifteen years of experience as a professional software developer and member of the Apache Software Foundation to provide users of Tapestry 3.0 with a definitive instruction guide to using Tapestry in crating full-featured web applications; and achieving common tasks ranging from form validation, and application localization; to client-side scripting and synchronization between browser and app server. From the creation of new components to integration J2EE, Tapestry In Action covers everything and does so with a thoroughly "user friendly" text enhanced with simple examples. No Java reference collection can be considered complete or comprehensive without the inclusion of Howard Ship's Tapestry In Action.
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Summary: Well-written book
Review: I bought this book without knowing much about Tapestry, as it seemed to be the best available source of information about the framework - and my assumptions were correct. The book is very well-written, easy to understand, and discusses a wide range of topics that you will be likely to encounter during development with Tapestry. But you will have to read it yourself to know what I mean. Once you have done that, you will know why this book changed my approach to web development with Java.
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Summary: Struts users, check this out!
Review: I've been working with Struts for 3 years now and I've taken the radical step to use Tapestry in my projects in favor of Struts. I'm not going in to detail (see other reviews and the tapestry site for that), but suffice it to say, Struts was good while it lasted, but I'll never start a new project with struts ever again since Tapestry came into my life. It's just the next step on the evolutionary ladder and this book will help you take the climb easy enough.
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Summary: Excellent introduction, solid examples
Review: Ship, and the folks at Manning, took some time on this one and it shows. The flow of the book, the examples, the code, and the use of sparing use of graphics combine to make this a high quality read that imparts information effectively.The introduction is fairly brief (about 20 pages). The author doesn't spend a lot of time on background or comparing this framework to other similar technologies (one of the books few flaws). Then he gets into a simple Hangman example in chapter two which provides a good groundwork for understanding the material in the chapters that follow. Chapter four, on HTML forms management, is a particularly fine chapter. Not only do the graphics augment the text well, the author adds bit of experiential non-Tapestry information. Like section 4.2.5 on enums which provides Java best-practice material in context, but which is not 100% relevant to Tapestry. I like to see that because all too often authors limit themselves too strictly to the topic and provide little valuable experiential material. This is especially true when they are discussing leading edge technology like Tapestry. It's nice to see that Manning has also started picking up on some of the hallmark items of other notable publishers, like the condensed and well organized component reference in Appendix C. This type of material augments turns this introductory piece, into a long-term reference. Definitely worth the buy if you are serious about using Tapestry as the basis for your Java web development.
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Summary: Excellent Book by the Creator
Review: Tapestry exists to simplify Java web application development. With Tapestry you can produce Java Servlets that extend the normal reach, allowing you to create more powerful, more useful, more interactive applications faster than you would using ordinary servlets. In addition, you'll have greater confidence that your application will be free of bugs. Tapestry applications are still servlet applications. With enough code and enough time to debug that code there is nothing you can do with Tapestry that you can't do with a servlet application. But you cna do it faster, easier. The book is written by Howard Lewis Ship. He is the creator and original designer of Tapestry and has made a remarkable effort to listen to users, understand their needs, and address their requirements. He was instrumental in the formation of the Tapestry community that has made Tapestry a part of the Apache Jakarta family. Tapestry is a companion project of other popular projects including Struts, Tomcat and log4J. More than most writers, Mr. Ship understands what you need to know to become more productive. He has written the book in a manner that leads the beginner along, and provides the expert with what they need to know. Excellent writing, excellent book.
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Summary: Tapesty In Action - Tapestry in Depth
Review: Tapestry in Action is a well written book that covers a lot of ground and goes into great depth. As a newcomer to Tapestry, it provided me with a solid foundation of the underpinings of the framework. The explanations, at times, go into so much detail that it occasionally becomes difficult to see the forest for the trees. But if you're truly interested in how things work, you'll appreciate the detail. If you're looking for a book to hold your hand and baby you through development of a tapestry application, you might want to wait for another book, but if you want to gain a solid grasp and understanding of the framework, this book is a must have.
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Summary: Very impressive effort
Review: Tapestry is a powerful presentation framework for web applications using components, but the project has been lacking current, extensive documentation. This new book by the creator of Tapestry has met the challenge. It is composed three major parts: getting started, developing Tapestry components, and putting it all together into a J2EE application complete with EJB. Fortunately, for the web app novice, Howard starts at the beginning. The prerequisites are fairly low. A moderate level of knowledge of Java and HTML are basically all that is required to follow the coding examples. Also, UML sequence diagrams are used to illustrate the flow of the Tapestry framework as described in the text.
One of the "knocks" against Tapestry has been the stiff learning curve. This book should help reader overcome this hurdle. Insight into the framework is built in a logical, incremental fashion. Because of this structure, it is best to read the book front to back unless you already are knowledgeable about Tapestry. The middle section will also serve as a good reference for building custom Tapestry components.
This is a great book. It is well written, relatively easy to follow, and about an interesting, timely product. If you are planning a J2EE project, this book and the framework deserve a look. Thankfully, Howard does not waste pages in an anti-Struts diatribe, but rather focuses on how Tapestry improves web development. Your challenge is how to fit that explanation into your boss's attention span.
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Summary: Nice coverage of Tapestry
Review: Tapestry is a web development framework that is radically different than most other frameworks used for web development. The author of this book, Howard Lewis Ship, is the principal architect of Tapestry. It is often the case that an expert is not necessarily the best person to write about a topic as they often forget what it is like to be a novice. The book starts with this problem but fortunately after the first couple of chapters the book improves greatly.
Chapter one is an introduction to Tapestry. The explanation is far from clear so if you don't know what Tapestry is when you start this chapter, you will still not know what it is when you finish. Chapter two is our first exposure to a Tapestry application but the author chooses a sample (a hangman game) that is complicated and is not a typical web application.
Chapters three through five discuss HTML forms and form components, showing how to use and validate them in a Tapestry application. The next three chapters show how to build your own form components and the last two chapters show how to build a complete Tapestry application. Starting with chapter three the book takes a turn for the better. If you were lost at the beginning of the book, it will all make sense by the time you get to the end.
I can strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in Tapestry whether they are a novice or an experienced Tapestry developer.
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Summary: Ant Script of Book Samples overwrites Tomcat server.xml
Review: The build script from the downloaded samples would carelessly overwrite your tomcat server.xml file. According to the comments found in the build.xml file of the "examples" app it was intended to "Copy into place a patched version of server.xml that doesn't contain special configuration for the /examples webapp context". The code author seems to be unaware of the need to preserve changes that people have made to their own copies of server.xml files. And I don't understand why the code author had to use the context name "examples" to introduce such unncessary complication for people who just casually download the samples to try out. So the deployment screwed up my tomcat server and overwrote many modifications I made in my server.xml file for various purposes such as enabling SSL. The book content is overall good. So I still give it 4 stars.
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Summary: You need this book
Review: This book is a must-have tool for anybody wanting to get started developing web applications with Tapestry. It is complete, straight to the point, with numerous examples, including a full-feature J2EE application.
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