My new group at ASU is loosely standardizing on Tapestry, so I’ve been spending some time learning it. We are officially using 4.1, I think, since it’s the latest official release, but I decided to go all rogue style and switch to 5.0 after spending some time on 4.1. From the noise on the web, it sounds like Tapestry gets completely rewritten for every new version, so 5.0 is pretty different from 4.1. Anyway, it seems much better, but there are still some weird problems. Here are some of the interesting things I’ve run into:

• If you need to call some Tapestry page from an outside app with data, you can simulate Tapestry’s “activation/passivation” by building URL strings which will feed your onActivate method. They look like this: http://localhost:8080/app/page/param1/param2, where param1 and param2 will be passed in a List (not an array, as I found out the hard way) to onActivate. I’m not sure if this is the best way to do it.
• If you loop through a list of items and want to be able to edit those items (like by having a checkbox), you pretty much need to set up a PrimaryKeyEncoder, otherwise it will serialize/deserialize stuff and all your changes will be lost. This was very hard to figure out.

So far I’m only moderately impressed. There seem to be too many assumptions that don’t fit the model of my first app very well, but we’ll see how it goes once I get better at it.