sammydavis/projects/tapestry/PROPOSAL.txt - incubator - Git at Google

 [0] rationale

 Tapestry, currently housed at the SourceForge? (http://tapestry.sf.net),
 is a component-based web application framework. Tapestry falls
 generally into the pull-MVC model of development.

 Tapestry is designed specifically around the creation of completely
 re-usable components. Components can easily be packaged into
 libraries and distributed within Jar files, even when they contain
 assets such as image files and stylesheets.

 Tapestry is organized around an abstraction that isolates
 application-specific logic from the details of the servlet API,
 such as HttpSession?, request, response, URLs and query parameters.

 Tapestry is highly pluggable, allowing any and all behavior to be
 customized by subclassing appropriate base classes.

 Tapestry is specifically not a JSP taglib. Tapestry uses its own
 method for instrumenting HTML that is extremely non-obtrusive (it
 still previews properly in a WYSIWYG editor). Tapestry has well
 specified, separate roles for HTML producers and Java developers,
 and allows them to work together without interfering with each
 other.

 The goal of Tapestry is to shift much of the burden of developing
 web applications onto the framework, and free the developer to work
 cleanly and effectively without concern for the many small details
 of web application development. The primary function of Tapestry
 is the automatic creation of URLs by the framework, facilitating
 a fine-grained dispatch model. The bird's-eye view is that, in
 Tapestry, actions (such as clicking a link, or submitting a form)
 are associated with a particular component and, through a simple
 delegation system, a particular bit of user code. There is no global
 registry of actions, as in Struts, and it's easy to create reusable
 components that define their own behaviors (in terms of links or
 forms), independent of the containing page.

 Tapestry applications can be extremely sophisticated with surprisingly
 little code.

 Tapestry includes a significant amount of documentation describing
 its strengths and features in great detail, available at
 http://tapestry.sf.net. Live demos, a great collection of user
 quotes, extensive documentation (HTML and PDF) and a recent code
 coverage report are all online.

 Tapestry has been an open-source project on SourceForge? since June
 2000. Milestone releases (such as 2.1 in July, or the just-released
 2.2) result in 6K - 7K downloads (increasing by over 1K downloads
 with each successive release). Tapestry has averaged over 3000
 downloads a month during 2002, with peaks above 8K/month.

 Tapestry has recently adopted Apache meritocracy rules to govern
 the project. The license for Tapestry has been changed from LGPL
 to Apache Software License.

 [0.1] criteria

 Meritocracy: Tapestry follows the Apache meritocracy rules, with
 a core of committers.

 Community: Tapestry has a modest, but very active community, centered
 around a user's mailing list (approx. 200 members), a developer's
 mailing list, and the Tapestry Wiki (http://tapestry.sf.net/wiki).
 The mailing lists have an exceptionally good signal-to-noise ratio;
 discussions typically revolve around planning new extensions to
 the framework, creating new components and documentation, and
 diagnosing developer issues. The developer's mailing list is used
 primarily for voting, and for discussions about votes. A secondary
 project, to provide a community component repository is now underway
 (http://sf.net/projects/tacos).

 Core Developers. Tapestry has an active and dedicated team of
 committers. The project was founded by Howard Lewis Ship, who is
 extremely dedicated to Tapestry and authored the majority of the
 codebase. Richard Lewis-Shell and Mind Bridge are frequent contributors
 of components and bug fixes as well as some significant extensions.
 Neil Clayton and Malcolm Edgar provide code and significant amounts
 of documentation. Geoff Longman has created an excellent plugin
 for the Eclipse IDE (as a separate project) and provides code to
 keep the two projects in sync. Several other developers contribute
 bug fixes, components and documentation.

 Alignment: Tapestry makes use of the ORO, commons-lang and
 commons-logging packages internally.

 Scope: Tapestry is entirely a server-side framework, well aligned
 with the overall goals of the Jakarta project.

 [0.2] warning signs

 Orphaned products. Tapestry is far from orphaned, it was originally
 conceived and executed specifically as an open-source project.

 Inexperience: Howard Lewis Ship has been coding, documenting,
 mentoring and managing this open source project for nearly three
 years. Others on the team have been actively using, supporting and
 extending Tapestry for over a year.

 Homogeneous Developers: The current Tapestry committers include
 representatives from Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand;
 other, more occasional, contributors represent South America and
 Asia. This is just the opposite of the "smoke filled room".

 Reliance on Salaried Developers: Tapestry is largely developed
 during free time. Many contributions are developed by consultants
 to address specific needs of their clients, then modularized and
 provided back to the community (for example, Geoff is developing
 a workflow management subsystem for Tapestry that may be released
 into the framework proper when completed). Increasingly, developers
 are finishing projects with Tapestry and contributing components
 created for those projects back into the project.

 No ties to other Apache Products: As stated above, Tapestry makes
 use of the ORO and commons packages and has numerous places where
 greater integration with Jakarta could occur. It is servlet container
 agnostic, working well with Tomcat, Jetty, Resin and others.

 Fascination with Apache Brand: Tapestry has been, and always will
 be an open-source project.

 [0.3] overlap with Turbine

 Turbine has a similar model to Tapestry, but the focus of the two
 projects is somewhat divergent. Turbine is a service-oriented where
 Tapestry is component-oriented. Turbine provides a larger toolkit
 (in the form of services) for aspects of the application not related
 directly to the presentation layer. Tapestry provides more flexibility
 and power in the presentation layer but doesn't provide any other
 services (such as scheduling, database access, security, etc.).

 Many Tapestry users are employing Tapestry for the presentation
 layer, but leverage the many Turbine services (especially Torque).

 [1] scope of subproject

 The project shall create and maintain packages written in the Java
 programming language constituting the framework itself, a standard
 library of additional components, documentation, a web site and
 additional examples.

 [2] identify the initial source from which the project is to be
 populated

 The project currently resides on the SourceForge? (http://tapestry.sf.net).

 [3] identify the Jakarta resources to be created

 [3.1] mailing lists(s)

 tapestry-user tapestry-dev tapestry-cvs

 [3.2] CVS repositories

 jakarta-tapestry

 [3.3] Bugzilla

 framework - tapestry components - web site, contrib library,
 documentation, examples

 [3.4] Wiki

 It is desired that a Wiki be setup. Use of the current Wiki
 (http://tapestry.sf.net/wiki) has proven highly successful in
 supporting distributed design, discussion and decision making, as
 well as providing a home for temporary documentation until permanent
 documentation changes occur. We would prefer MoinMoin?, a Python
 Wiki implementation.

 [4] identify the initial set of committers

 Mind Bridge mindbridge  mindbridgeweb@yahoo.com

 Neil Clayton    nclayton    neil@cloudnine.net.nz

 Malcolm Edgar   medgar  malcolm_edgar@hotmail.com

 Richard Lewis-Shell rlewisshell rlewisshell@mac.com

 Howard Lewis Ship   hlship  hlship@attbi.com

 Geoff Longman   glongman    glongman@intelligentworks.com

 [5] identify apache sponsoring individual

 Andrew C. Oliver

 dIon Gillard
	[0] rationale

	Tapestry, currently housed at the SourceForge? (http://tapestry.sf.net),
	is a component-based web application framework. Tapestry falls
	generally into the pull-MVC model of development.

	Tapestry is designed specifically around the creation of completely
	re-usable components. Components can easily be packaged into
	libraries and distributed within Jar files, even when they contain
	assets such as image files and stylesheets.

	Tapestry is organized around an abstraction that isolates
	application-specific logic from the details of the servlet API,
	such as HttpSession?, request, response, URLs and query parameters.

	Tapestry is highly pluggable, allowing any and all behavior to be
	customized by subclassing appropriate base classes.

	Tapestry is specifically not a JSP taglib. Tapestry uses its own
	method for instrumenting HTML that is extremely non-obtrusive (it
	still previews properly in a WYSIWYG editor). Tapestry has well
	specified, separate roles for HTML producers and Java developers,
	and allows them to work together without interfering with each
	other.

	The goal of Tapestry is to shift much of the burden of developing
	web applications onto the framework, and free the developer to work
	cleanly and effectively without concern for the many small details
	of web application development. The primary function of Tapestry
	is the automatic creation of URLs by the framework, facilitating
	a fine-grained dispatch model. The bird's-eye view is that, in
	Tapestry, actions (such as clicking a link, or submitting a form)
	are associated with a particular component and, through a simple
	delegation system, a particular bit of user code. There is no global
	registry of actions, as in Struts, and it's easy to create reusable
	components that define their own behaviors (in terms of links or
	forms), independent of the containing page.

	Tapestry applications can be extremely sophisticated with surprisingly
	little code.

	Tapestry includes a significant amount of documentation describing
	its strengths and features in great detail, available at
	http://tapestry.sf.net. Live demos, a great collection of user
	quotes, extensive documentation (HTML and PDF) and a recent code
	coverage report are all online.

	Tapestry has been an open-source project on SourceForge? since June
	2000. Milestone releases (such as 2.1 in July, or the just-released
	2.2) result in 6K - 7K downloads (increasing by over 1K downloads
	with each successive release). Tapestry has averaged over 3000
	downloads a month during 2002, with peaks above 8K/month.

	Tapestry has recently adopted Apache meritocracy rules to govern
	the project. The license for Tapestry has been changed from LGPL
	to Apache Software License.

	[0.1] criteria

	Meritocracy: Tapestry follows the Apache meritocracy rules, with
	a core of committers.

	Community: Tapestry has a modest, but very active community, centered
	around a user's mailing list (approx. 200 members), a developer's
	mailing list, and the Tapestry Wiki (http://tapestry.sf.net/wiki).
	The mailing lists have an exceptionally good signal-to-noise ratio;
	discussions typically revolve around planning new extensions to
	the framework, creating new components and documentation, and
	diagnosing developer issues. The developer's mailing list is used
	primarily for voting, and for discussions about votes. A secondary
	project, to provide a community component repository is now underway
	(http://sf.net/projects/tacos).

	Core Developers. Tapestry has an active and dedicated team of
	committers. The project was founded by Howard Lewis Ship, who is
	extremely dedicated to Tapestry and authored the majority of the
	codebase. Richard Lewis-Shell and Mind Bridge are frequent contributors
	of components and bug fixes as well as some significant extensions.
	Neil Clayton and Malcolm Edgar provide code and significant amounts
	of documentation. Geoff Longman has created an excellent plugin
	for the Eclipse IDE (as a separate project) and provides code to
	keep the two projects in sync. Several other developers contribute
	bug fixes, components and documentation.

	Alignment: Tapestry makes use of the ORO, commons-lang and
	commons-logging packages internally.

	Scope: Tapestry is entirely a server-side framework, well aligned
	with the overall goals of the Jakarta project.

	[0.2] warning signs

	Orphaned products. Tapestry is far from orphaned, it was originally
	conceived and executed specifically as an open-source project.

	Inexperience: Howard Lewis Ship has been coding, documenting,
	mentoring and managing this open source project for nearly three
	years. Others on the team have been actively using, supporting and
	extending Tapestry for over a year.

	Homogeneous Developers: The current Tapestry committers include
	representatives from Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand;
	other, more occasional, contributors represent South America and
	Asia. This is just the opposite of the "smoke filled room".

	Reliance on Salaried Developers: Tapestry is largely developed
	during free time. Many contributions are developed by consultants
	to address specific needs of their clients, then modularized and
	provided back to the community (for example, Geoff is developing
	a workflow management subsystem for Tapestry that may be released
	into the framework proper when completed). Increasingly, developers
	are finishing projects with Tapestry and contributing components
	created for those projects back into the project.

	No ties to other Apache Products: As stated above, Tapestry makes
	use of the ORO and commons packages and has numerous places where
	greater integration with Jakarta could occur. It is servlet container
	agnostic, working well with Tomcat, Jetty, Resin and others.

	Fascination with Apache Brand: Tapestry has been, and always will
	be an open-source project.

	[0.3] overlap with Turbine

	Turbine has a similar model to Tapestry, but the focus of the two
	projects is somewhat divergent. Turbine is a service-oriented where
	Tapestry is component-oriented. Turbine provides a larger toolkit
	(in the form of services) for aspects of the application not related
	directly to the presentation layer. Tapestry provides more flexibility
	and power in the presentation layer but doesn't provide any other
	services (such as scheduling, database access, security, etc.).

	Many Tapestry users are employing Tapestry for the presentation
	layer, but leverage the many Turbine services (especially Torque).

	[1] scope of subproject

	The project shall create and maintain packages written in the Java
	programming language constituting the framework itself, a standard
	library of additional components, documentation, a web site and
	additional examples.

	[2] identify the initial source from which the project is to be
	populated

	The project currently resides on the SourceForge? (http://tapestry.sf.net).

	[3] identify the Jakarta resources to be created

	[3.1] mailing lists(s)

	tapestry-user tapestry-dev tapestry-cvs

	[3.2] CVS repositories

	jakarta-tapestry

	[3.3] Bugzilla

	framework - tapestry components - web site, contrib library,
	documentation, examples

	[3.4] Wiki

	It is desired that a Wiki be setup. Use of the current Wiki
	(http://tapestry.sf.net/wiki) has proven highly successful in
	supporting distributed design, discussion and decision making, as
	well as providing a home for temporary documentation until permanent
	documentation changes occur. We would prefer MoinMoin?, a Python
	Wiki implementation.

	[4] identify the initial set of committers

	Mind Bridge mindbridge mindbridgeweb@yahoo.com

	Neil Clayton nclayton neil@cloudnine.net.nz

	Malcolm Edgar medgar malcolm_edgar@hotmail.com

	Richard Lewis-Shell rlewisshell rlewisshell@mac.com

	Howard Lewis Ship hlship hlship@attbi.com

	Geoff Longman glongman glongman@intelligentworks.com

	[5] identify apache sponsoring individual

	Andrew C. Oliver

	dIon Gillard