The author Alexander Kolesnikov has significant experience in programming, dating back to 1979 and Fortran. This is his second book that follows the one published in 2007.
The book contains elegant introduction to Tapestry 5 with additional focus on building high performing scalable web apps. The first chapter is introductory, serves as a advert of Tapestry and a taste of things to come. The second helps reader to configure IDE, because practical exercises are encouraged through out the book.
From the next chapter starts the description of the framework. The third illustrates basic Tapestry mechanics that revolve around "Page classes". Author shows how to link them with corresponding views that are enriched html files. Moreover passing data between pages, events and using components is presented. The following chapters provide info on using other parts of the framework like localization, validation etc. and act as a tutorial for building your own components.
The book was very easy to read. I can't recall anything that would be difficult to comprehend. Boring parts were rare. Global focus on scalability made it fun to read, because it is not a common part of web app tutorials to remind you how session management influences performance.
Overall the composition of the book is very neat. The most important stuff is put first although you can skip the parts you are familiar with like I did with IDE configuration.
Howard Levis-Ship the author of Tapestry says that in a good framework "the right thing to do is the easiest one". You can find that idea in every aspect of the framework that is well represented in the book. The focus on scalability is a nice addition to thorough Tapestry 5 description.
I am not an expert on web apps, so I value the parts that revolve around basics too. Reading the book was fun. Since I did not made any effort into practically using Tapestry during the course of reading it, I was unable tell whether it is better that say JSF with Facelets. However it provided much insight into web app development with Tapestry. Definitely Tapestry is easier to use, but the real difficulties lie in merging pages with code which I am unable to compare. As usual one needs to try it out in at least medium sized application to find out. Anyway I can recommend this book to anyone who wishes to find out what Tapestry 5 has to offer and anyone who does not feel like an expert in web app development ant would like to go through an introduction on scalable web app development.
Author(s): Alexander Kolesnikov
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 280
