NOTE: This information is from an evaluation conducted in June 2004. |
We recently had to make a web application framework choice. We reviewed several, including:
After a lot of reading, we chose Cocoon. After trying to use it, we went back to the drawing board with a well formed process. We applied that process to Cocoon and Tapestry. The following outlines our experience, but more importantly it outlines the process and evaluations that we made.
This included the following steps in an effort to follow existing documentation and make an initial evaluation.
After these steps were complete, we evaluated frustration, ease of installation, ease of getting the samples running.
This included finding the parts of the tool required to build out application, and getting them integrated into our application build environment. Our environment uses Eclipse for daily development, and Maven/Ant for nightly builds and testing. This environment is pretty standard and easy to integrate.
The title says it all. We had a small prototype that had to meet the following criteria inorder to pass.
After the prototype was built, we made several detailed evaluations.
Cocoon passed with flying colors Tapestry passed with flying colors
Cocoon passed with flying colors Tapestry passed with flying colors
This evaluation tried to determine the amount of extra stuff that adopting a particular framework imposed upon the application. This included items from the following list:
This is why I gave up on Cocoon, to much XML plumbing, to flexible, to many features.
Tapestry is very lean in this regard, I build a lot of application and very little plumbing.
Cocoon has some very good documentation about separation of concerns and how that helps, but in practice Cocoon simply does to much stuff and is easy to get off in the weeds for our staff.
Tapestry's strength interactive web applications. It also has excellent separation of concerns. This combined with the component model allows for a very modular application with modules that focus on a single task and can be integrated with ease. Needless to say, Tapestry passed with flying colors.
Both are ASF and Apache License, nuff said
Cocoon is big, very big.
Tapestry has just enough to get our application built. The designer seems to have paid particular attention to having a small learnable API. Very good in this respect.
As you can tell, Tapestry was chosen for all the reasons stated here. An interesting point is that following were not high in priority during the evaluation.
Fundamentally what was really important were the following: