ok I got control of this now... my login works and home page displays having opened up my code for first time since June 2013, I saw I was stomping out BOOTSTRAP as recommended in the apache tapestry appmodule config page... which tells you to do this
configuration.add(SymbolConstants.BOOTSTRAP_ROOT, "classpath:/META-INF/assets"); and supplement blank css and js files for bootstrap. Thats what was causing me this original error. I took away the above configuration and now my app runs. So I do not know why documented recommended practice failed to work. if I find out I will tell. Geoff, if you want to try and configure bootstrap as recommended you may reproduce this. Has anyone successfully integrated ANGULAR ? Some folks say that tapestry might interfere with such an integration by use of the hidden pattern during markup. Any tips on this are appreciated. Thanks Ken