[Tapestry-developer] complex components

[Christian Sell]

Hello,

Being a newbie to Tapestry I chose to get my feet wet by implementing a little, however reasonably complex component - a calendar which should be fully localized and provide a way to move forward and backward monthwise, etc. I already have it implemented in struts/tiles, and wanted to see how Tapestry fares.

As a first resume, I must say that Tapestry has a rather steep learning curve - mostly caused by the multiple files one has to handle for each and every little item (like implementing a foreach loop or a conditional branch). Tiles tags are definitely simpler to handle - and scripting a JSP (or Velocity) is the easiest.

To some extent I can see this is due to the complex logic involved in the problem. The calendar cannot be layed out statically in HTML, with individual items replaced by business logic results - it requires a nested loop with conditionals inside. Expressing this type of logic in a template language is simply a pain (after all, this is what we have programming languages for).
Doing this in a html template language like Tapestry has almost only drawbacks - the HTML becomes completely unmaintainable, both for humans and for design tools, and runtime efficiency is also questionable.

OK, after ranting, heres my immediate questions:

1. Is there a recommendation for situations as the above? Is there a way to directly write parts of the component to the response stream from a Java method when the logic becomes too complex?

2. I need to also dynamically determine some tag attributes (i.e., "class=" style attributes). In a JSP, I can write something like <td class="<%=byBean.getStyle()%>">. How is this done with tapestry?

thanks,
Christian Sell



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