Howard M. Lewis Ship

I strongly believe that, when it comes to technology, people learn through their fingertips. To that aim, I teach Tapestry as an interactive workshop consisting of ten labs. Each lab teaches a different aspect of Tapestry; a particular component or set of components, or a particular challenge developers are likely to face.

Each lab starts with a 20 to 30 minute presentation that will outline the goals of the lab: the issues to be tackled, the components to be covered, the special challenges to be explored. The labs themselves consist of an Eclipse project and a partially working Tapestry application (usually, just a single page). The goal is to "fix" the application, by adding and configuring components, and by writing small amounts of Java code. For the more complex labs, the work is broken up into smaller stages. Each lab includes a cheat sheet to ensure that no one gets too frustrated.

This Workshop approach is a way for me to gently lead people into the way of Tapestry, and to help developers understand exactly what it is that Tapestry does and even how it operates internally. Although the labs are geared for developers new to web development and new to Tapestry, they are also rich with information of value to even seasoned Tapestry developers.

The Tapestry Workshop environment is based on VMWare and Ubuntu Linux. Using this combination, I can easily deliver a complete, self-contained, pre-configured development environment that each student can run safely on their own computer or laptop.

There are currently ten labs:

• Lab 1 - helloworld: Setup an Eclipse-based development environment and create a "Hello World" application
• Lab 2 - calc: Create a simple Calculator; learn about DirectLink component, page state, Tapestry annotations, and listener methods
• Lab 3 - form: Basic forms and simple validation, plus using HiveMind services within Tapestry pages
• Lab 4 - validform: Enhance lab 3 with full user input validation, server-side and client-side
• Lab 5 - formloop: Build a To Do list that demonstates mixing forms and loops; learn how to handle changing server-side state
• Lab 6 - simplecomponents: Creating simple, output-only components
• Lab 7 - unittest: Learn the basics of unit testing with JUnit and EasyMock, and techniques for testing Tapestry components
• Lab 8 - localization: Build a user input form that can be viewed in different languages
• Lab 9 - table: Discover the power and flexiblity of Tapestry's data grid component, the Table
• Lab 10 - js: A component approach to HTML requires a component approach to client-side JavaScript as well

The labs are designed to be challenging but not frustrating. The actual amount of code that needs to be written is small and very simple; anyone with even a basic understanding of Java, HTML and XML will have no problems. You just need to understand the differences between concerete and abstract classes, Java interfaces, and JavaBeans properties.

I recommend at least four days of class time to cover this amount of material. Most clients schedule an additional day to go in-depth on their particular application.

Howard maintains a blog about Tapestry, HiveMind, and software development in general at http://howardlewisship.com/blog/.