Ten Years of Tapestry

I recently realized that the first prototype of Tapestry was written ten years ago! It all started as a home project in my living room, with the original inspiration coming from some brief exposure to WebObjects.

Even the "new" codebase, Tapestry 5, is well over three years old at this point.

How long can I ride this dragon? Pretty far, I think ... Tapestry keeps getting better, I keep learning new things, and the community keeps growing. I'm also very impressed by the other Tapestry committers, who have really been stepping up to the plate, not just with code, but with infrastructure issues and the backporting of bug fixes.

I think there are a lot of exciting things afoot in the larger Tapestry world right now. Powerful new features are in the 5.2 code base (still in alpha), including enhancements for JSR-303 (bean validation) and a lot of (backwards compatible) changes to the way component classes are enhanced at runtime. I'm also steaming ahead with a number of big improvements to how JavaScript is organized in the rendered page.

Outside of the core project, there's quite a lot going on. Here's a few things that have caught my attention recently:

First off, there's Wooki, a sizable Tapestry application (open source, on GitHub) for collaborative book writing. It's very pretty to look at, and the code looks quite ship-shape (no pun intended). I think Wookie is not only going to prove useful on its own terms, but is also going to serve as a great example code base for Tapestry.

Next up is Tynamo ... think Rails/Grails meets Tapestry. It's an extension to Tapestry that supports even faster RAD development, automatically creating CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) pages for Hibernate entities. These same people have been building REST support for Tapestry as well as conversational state. Lots of good stuff here (though I haven't had a chance to try it out in detail).

I've been busy with my own Tapestry Extensions project at GitHub. I'm in a lucky space ... I'm adding features to Tapestry and TapX to fit my client's needs.

We're also seeing the deployments of some very large Tapestry 5 applications, such as SeeSaw which is the UK's answer to Hulu ... streaming video on demand. This is expected to be one of the highest bandwidth sites in Europe once it leaves beta.

The shame of it is ... I'm just the creator of the framework; I don't know 1% of what's going on with applications developed in Tapestry. If you are working on something cool, please drop me a line!