After some weeks of work once again I ported my little weblog system :-) This new version is now powered by the following technologies:

• Tapestry for the presentation layer
• Spring as the container
• Hibernate for DAO
• Lucene for fulltext search (currently deactivated)

All in all I am very happy with Tapestry. Though it has it quirks as well it is still a great framework to develop with. It clearly features a very object oriented way of web development. I really like WebWork for its simplicity and effectiveness too, but it is focused around the controller. Tapestry, however, gives you, the developer, the possibilty to develop true web components. A component consist not only of a Java class but of a HTML template as well (in fact it consits of three files: definition, Java class and an optional template). Thanks to its concept of a markup writer it is very easy to manipulate the HTML code from Java. Some components for example can make use of a renderer such as the form component. If the validation of a form fails the renderer of the form marks the wrong fields dynamically by modifying the HTML code on-the-fly. Very cool!

Well, as you might guess, I am a great fan of Tapestry :-)