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Introduction and Target Audiences:
Tapestry in Action is an excellent work done by Howard Lewis Ship. Author’s efforts can be clearly seen in the knowledge rich text of the book. Tapestry being an application framework for Java programming language is meant mainly for the developers who are looking ahead for building their own web based application. This book is a great help to all those who want to break up their target application into parts so as to enable different developers to work on individual parts. Attention to all those who are busy producing their web application with age-old traditional approaches. Friends it is still not too late for you to take advantage of this start to finish book on tapestry technology. This book gives an in-depth and complete knowledge of all the relevant tapestry features. Over the course of this book readers will come across various examples including source codes necessary for different applications. Anyone who is burning his hands in developing difficult web application will surely feel the relief which tapestry can provide to them through this book. Since Tapestry encourages team development of web applications, all managers who seek some help in boosting their team’s efforts can also take an additional advantage from it.
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Organization of the book:
Author had very efficiently limited the scope of this book to ten chapters. Hearing this one should not under estimate the work done by Howard Lewis Ship as he had covered every single tapestry aspect no matter small or big in his book. The book through its simple yet effective narration gives its readers a real life experience of teacher and student. All ten chapters had been written in such a way that readers whether beginners or advance programmers will never get disappointed by its contents. Author had categorized the ten chapters into three parts. Depending on the users’ need these chapters along with topics had been effectively grouped together into respective parts. Readers can pick the topic of their choice and can also skip forward in order to refer some advance material.
Book starts with Part1 consisting of five chapters. Each chapter contributes in building a platform for the new readers who are unaware how Tapestry is going to make their life easy in the upcoming pages of the book. Starting from page one till the last line signed off by author, each page brings with it a new and interesting learning for the readers. Chapter one is a small introduction of Tapestry and speaks mainly of the web applications along with the need of a framework like Tapestry in such environment. Giving the readers an overview this introductory chapter also talks about the goals of Tapestry along with some essential Tapestry classes and interfaces. On the other hand author says much regarding the implementation issues in chapter two. Creating HTML
templates, clickable links, encoding extra information into link URLs are some of the key aspects raised in this chapter. Feeding the readers with implementation at such an early stage reflects the tight organization of the book. Without wasting much of developer’s time author had directly hit on the target by enabling them to check out the help provided by Tapestry while developing their applications.
Without going off the track, author smoothly moves on to the handling of HTML forms in Tapestry in next chapter. Apart from discussing simple form and page properties creation issues the chapter also deals with some advanced topics of looping while forms creation. Chapter four takes this discussion regarding forms further and highlights some of the advanced form components. It also raises a comparison between simple and complex components. Here author gives its readers enough material for creating their own drop-down lists, storing hidden data in forms and uploading files. Chapter five deals with Tapestry’s form-validation subsystem.Form validation being a critical and important designing aspect attracts sufficient author’s discussion. Here author not only discusses various requirements of a usable validating interface but also highlights different validators and validation delegates. This section allows the developers to have a quick reference of the validation aspect of web application development which they can easily use in their own applications. Entire literature had been organized so well that one just need to refer their topic of interest without starting from page one. This comes as an- catching point of the book making it different from other Tapestry literature in the market.
Second part of the book relates to the creation of Tapestry components. This part consisting of the next three chapters says much about the creation of reusable components, scalability issues, and then some of the advanced components making Tapestry a perfect framework for its user. Starting with creation of component templates chapter six makes the readers more comfortable in working with components packaged in libraries and also in creation of libraries. Chapter seven is more about the inner implementation of Tapestry. Apart from addressing some scalability issues the chapter also speaks about creation of URLs, localization and loading and pooling of pages in the best of its ways. Moving on to chapter eight the author tries to give the already familiar readers a quick but effective knowledge regarding some advanced components and techniques in Tapestry. It includes creation of client-side Java Script along with the Tapestry integration with a traditional JSP application.
Author writes the third and last part of the book for all those who had waited patiently for an extensive hands-on of building a complete Tapestry application. Chapter nine and ten describes the virtual library, a complete J2EE example application using Tapestry along with some access limitations to parts of the application. Issues like combining of Tapestry with Enterprise Java Beans, authentication of user, adding of security checks to pages etc. had been discussed in an effective manner. This last part answers to all those practical queries which developers might have in their minds while reading the previous chapters.
Ending the discussion with an effective example application thereby checking reader’s knowledge attained so far is also one of the factors which impresses the user and collects some extra points for the book.
Finally:
This book is one of the finest creations on Tapestry among those available in the market. With its easy narration and smooth flow it proves to be a great help to early developers. The author shares his knowledge in a very clear and simple way which makes it easy for the readers to associate themselves with the book. All those who want to start early with the tapestry framework for their application should definitely book a copy for themselves. The book satisfies all of their needs and helps them in building a robust application of their own. Finally, a book worthy to be bought by every web developer!!.
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