(This might be a little too long. I have no thing to do at work, I'm bored, and this usually leads to large chunks of incomprehensible text)
First, some background: I'm current developing an application with a common backend accessed by both a Tapestry and a RIFE front layers. The IDEA here is to make a direct comparision of the effort and development experience of the two frameworks. RIFE has many good points about it, but since this mailing list isn't about it, I'll shorten the list to one golden point: nice, explicit URL's. The user is able to specify a URL for each element (page) in the site, and how to map URL parameters to the element's inputs. Just a quick example: <element id="details" file="category/details.xml" url="/category/*"> <pathinfo mapping="$id"/> </element> This would map all URL's starting with "/category" to the "details" element, and the URL's pathinfo (what comes after /category) will be translated to an input parameter called "id". This way, a URL like "http://example.com/category/10"; directly maps to that element, using 10 as the id parameter. I can't overstate how nice this is, specially when developing RESTful API's. I know how Tapestry stress that "developers shouldn't worry about URL's", but IMHO this couldn't be far from the truth. Sure, the way Tapestry relieves the developer from the drudging URL mapping and query parameters processing is nice, but the way the developer completely surrenders control over URL mapping isn't that nice. By now you're probably screaming "mod_rewrite!" or "UrlRewriteFilter!". These two guys could solve the problem, but in a somewhat hackish way: the devoloper would have to write down the tapestry-generated URL's, and by definition these shouldn't be tampered with. It would be a lot nicer if Tapestry itself could take user-specified URL's, and redirect them to the correct page, even if it's just an internal redirect to the generated URL. One other thing I miss in Tapestry are templateless pages -- a page where all output is rendered programatically, and no template is needed. I know, I could write a whole new service, but isn't that a little too much? Specially if you have only a couple of these pages in an otherwise big application. Ok, this message is getting too long (but a lot shorter than it's sister message in RIFE's mailing list). Let's see if I can get some replies, and pick up from them. -- Marcus Brito --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
