Customer Reviews

Tapestry in Action (In Action series)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book seems to be well written and very fine IF AND ONLY IF you are using version 3 and have no plans to upgrade any time soon. If you are using version 4 or plan to any time soon, trying to follow along with this book will send you on a series of wild-goose chases trying to figure out why none of the examples work. Instead I recommend Kent Tong's book, which has been revised to reflect Tapestry 4.

All of the sample code and concepts are based on version 3, and I could not get a single example to work (e.g., the Authentication example relies on the Visit class, which is deprecated. The banner ad example relies on the AbstractService class, which is gone in version 4 - the upgrade guide says simply "that class has been removed so you will have significant rewrites." Not exactly helpful in the "how to" department.)

Tapestry in Action is a well written book that covers a lot of ground and goes into great depth. As a newcomer to Tapestry, it provided me with a solid foundation of the underpinings of the framework. The explanations, at times, go into so much detail that it occasionally becomes difficult to see the forest for the trees. But if you're truly interested in how things work, you'll appreciate the detail. If you're looking for a book to hold your hand and baby you through development of a tapestry application, you might want to wait for another book, but if you want to gain a solid grasp and understanding of the framework, this book is a must have.

Tapestry in Action is another great In Action book. It does a great job of explaining Tapestry with lots of examples. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to develop J2EE applications and needs an alternative to Struts, non-existent JSF, and standard Servlets.

this book is not well written. Tapestry is a new way of developing web applications and the author glance through way too many concepts that are essential to understand tapestry web development. For instance, OGNL is havily used by tapestry, but the author does not even bother to spend a little time explaining how it's been used by tapestry. I was left with a lot more questions on tapestry after reading this book. This book only serves as an introduction to tapestry and lacks full coverage. If you buy this book, you will have to spend a lot of time researching the net to find answers to basic question that (I think) should have been addressed by the book. Especially since the author is also the lead developer of Tapestry.

Also be aware that this book only covers Tapestry 3.0 and not 4.0

Ship, and the folks at Manning, took some time on this one and it shows. The flow of the book, the examples, the code, and the use of sparing use of graphics combine to make this a high quality read that imparts information effectively.

The introduction is fairly brief (about 20 pages). The author doesn't spend a lot of time on background or comparing this framework to other similar technologies (one of the books few flaws). Then he gets into a simple Hangman example in chapter two which provides a good groundwork for understanding the material in the chapters that follow.

Chapter four, on HTML forms management, is a particularly fine chapter. Not only do the graphics augment the text well, the author adds bit of experiential non-Tapestry information. Like section 4.2.5 on enums which provides Java best-practice material in context, but which is not 100% relevant to Tapestry. I like to see that because all too often authors limit themselves too strictly to the topic and provide little valuable experiential material. This is especially true when they are discussing leading edge technology like Tapestry.

It's nice to see that Manning has also started picking up on some of the hallmark items of other notable publishers, like the condensed and well organized component reference in Appendix C. This type of material augments turns this introductory piece, into a long-term reference.

Definitely worth the buy if you are serious about using Tapestry as the basis for your Java web development.

I've been working with Struts for 3 years now and I've taken the radical step to use Tapestry in my projects in favor of Struts. I'm not going in to detail (see other reviews and the tapestry site for that), but suffice it to say, Struts was good while it lasted, but I'll never start a new project with struts ever again since Tapestry came into my life. It's just the next step on the evolutionary ladder and this book will help you take the climb easy enough.

This books is just no longer relevant. Even when it was relevant (back in 2004), it was not a good way to start learning Tapestry. I would have preferred more barebones examples, rather than jumbling a bunch of stuff into a kitchen-sink "workbench".

There is no Manning book for Tapestry 4.x, which for a long while was the way to go. "Enjoying Web Development with Tapestry" is a good book, which is like set of heavy duty tutorials with mini-evolutions of the project during the chapter. It happens to mimic the way I learn things.

Now, Tapestry 5 is on the horizon, and it looks really good so far. Hopefully someone will release a book for entry-level Tapestry adopters, especially since Tapestry 5 is radically different than/incompatible with version 3 or 4.

The Tapestry mailing list is the best replacement for this book. You may also want to search the net for a free book on Apache Maven, which is the preferred method of building applications that use developmental versions of Tapestry 5.

This is a well written book, but it only addresses Tapestry 3. Tapestry 4 and 5 were each complete re-writes. The examples in this book will not work on later versions. I found it slightly useful in understanding some concepts when creating a Tapestry 4 project. Tapestry 5 is much improved, but this book will not help you with it at all.

This book describes Tapestry 3, while Tapestry 4 will be hopefully released soon, in some aspects quite different from it's predecessor. But still, I would recommend this book to everyone who is going to use Tapestry and who wants to understand the framework. Because Howard, being the creator of Tapestry, shows the main ideas and principles around which the framework was built, and the most important of them do not change with a next release. They only become more efficiently expressed.

Having said that, I should warn that this isn't the best book for the complete Tapestry beginners. In a number of cases the author tries to speak at a beginner's level, but he obviously knows too much :) and cares too much for this.

However, there is a number of Tapestry tutorials available in the Web, and having started with them, you will definitely want to read this book.

This book is very well written. I have read several books on servlet/jsp development and none of them explain with such clarity the challenges one finds in the real world. Besides being a great book on the Tapestry framework, it's a wonderful exploration of web application development in general. Mr. Lewis succeeds in transforming the typical paradigm into something much more powerful and compelling. I am currently working on a project with Tapestry and the book has been invaluable in allowing me to get started on the right foot.