Tapestry momentum building

It's pretty clear that the momentum behind Tapestry is building; I just can't keep up with the flow of mail on the user list. Fortunately, the other heavy hitters (MindBridge, David, Erik and Harish, primarily) are keeping up. The first chapter in the book is being proofed right now; I suspect it will actually be available via MEAP next week-ish and the book will be in stores January or February; not so bad, considering the amount of last-minute rewrites. I suspect Tapestry will explode once that's available.

I know the pain, currently, of doing Struts development. I did some at WebCT, but I'm primarily doing UI work for NLG. It Struts, 1.1, Tiles, Tomcat, JBoss. Session facade layer to entity EJBs. Heavy use of XDoclet for the EJBs, for the Strut's Actions and servlet tags, etc.

However, any time I go to do anything, it feels like I'm having to juggle through so many different files. Some obvious things, such as having one Action forward to another Action (the second Action exists to get data from the facade and push into request attributes for use by the JSP) were just painful; I ended up creating a global forward for that since I had several different Actions that had to reference the data-loading Action.

Then there's the problem of figuring out how to reference actions from other actions, or from JSPs. Leading slash or no leading slash? ".do" suffix or no suffix? Global forward or local forward? Seems like this should be easy to do, but I had to do lots of fiddling around.

I don't like Dynaforms but the team standardized on them. You are very limited in terms of what data can be stored in a dynamform. Seems like it should automatically be able to convert to any types that takes a single string constructor parameter, but no ... very much hard coded (I peeked at the code).

Feedback: One of the four "pillars" of Tapestry (with Simplicity, Efficiency and Consistency). Boy do I miss Tapestry exception reporting! When things go wrong, I have no clue ... I just always have to run JBoss with the debugger and always have to set lots of break points. I ended up adding a custom JSP tag to our pages to display servlet request parameters and attributes and session attributes (a limited form of what you see in the Workbench) and that helps, a little.

Erik Hatcher couldn't believe I'd even consider a job developing Struts ... but, hey, I'm building up a war chest here while I start lining up the serious Tapestry opportunities.