I am not a newbie to Tapestry.  But I am about to teach a relative newbie
(was doing JSP).  I will get his feedback and I will give mine after we
finish the training process.  Though he might not be a good example of the
"average user" as I tell him once how something complex works and he "gets
it" first try.  Quite a smart lad, I guess I should be careful, he might
take my job :-)

Anyways, I in general find that it takes between 3 - 5 days for someone to
really grasp the true nature of Tapestry.  I have so far taught 6
programmers and 1 graphics designer (no programming, just dealing with jwc
and html)).  The end result of those 3 to 5 days is the ability to create
full blown database driven, dynamic sites.  The biggest hurdle in the
process was trying to get people to think in terms of "Properties, methods,
and bindings".  They kept reusing and copying code instead of using
properties and object graphs.  The biggest example is that they would create
a bunch of variables with gets/sets in the page, attach them to the form
fields and then in the form submit copying them into the Object Binding
objects (Apache Torque).  I would show them that they could store the OJB in
the visit and attach the input fields (ValidField and the like) directly to
the object.  That way the same page could serve for both creating and
editing database records.  It's not the complexity of the framework that is
hard, I find it personally to be so simple that it's actually enjoyable to
program in it, it's the paradigm of programming.

Having said that, I think the idea of creating anonymous tags (<SPAN
type="Body" jwcid="Body"> or <SPAN type="ForEach" jwcid="loop" source="list"
value="item">) might be worth exploring.  I know that they break the idea of
seperation in MVC, but it very well could speed the day to day development
jobs.  I don't find this idea to be as bad as JSP, at least my graphics
designers know to "Leave the SPANs alone!!".

Enough ranting.




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