2007/07/30
Let's see, what did I say in the last post? That "we get the improvements to the presentation layer for free". In the next point release of Trails, version 1.1, we've focused on upgrading the framework to use Tapestry 4.1.2. While the Tapestry core itself is great and stable, the new byte-code compilation enhanced OGNL has taken some time to mature. It's slowed us down a bit but once again, Alejandro has done a lot of ground work to make the upgrade happen and Jesse Kuhnert has been great at fixing emerging OGNL bugs. A lot can be said about Tapestry 4.x' learning curve but I doubt many would seriously challenge its position as one of the leading and most comprehensive Java web application frameworks at the moment. On top of it, Tap 4.1.2 introduces built-in integration with Dojo. In 1.1 we won't rely heavily on AJAX functionality, but we'll demonstrate some parts of it and we have great plans for it in future versions.
Not to make this post a praise on Tapestry, there's also a few other main features we wanted to introduce in 1.1. We are tracking those fairly closely on our simple Roadmap and at this point the feature work for all of them is already done. One feature highlight is the security enhancements that provide a real, rigid security for Trails application out of the box - compared to the earlier light approach that was simply based on hiding the information from the view alone. Personally, I've grown to hate the "hello world" examples that demonstrate how super-easy it is to develop something simple with that new next-generation web application framework of choice, but then stop short of providing anything for those more complex, but equally critical real-world problems like providing security. We decided to tackle the issue by providing something for the typical scenarios, and so, as a result in Trails 1.1 a use case where a user can edit his profile (and ONLY his own profile) can be secured with just a single annotation. Not bad, huh? And of course, it's implemented with extensibility in mind. We call the concept "owner instance" -based security, where the currently logged in user is required to have some relationship with the entity he wants to view or modify. Are there any other Java web application frameworks that do the same out of the box?
The remaining items before we we are ready for a release involve collapsing the development branch to the main trunk, adding some test cases and then revising the documentation. Our informal estimates have been holding up surprisingly well so far so we are hoping to get the release out sometime this Fall for all of you Trailers!
PS. While I have no ambitions to make Trails the most popular Java web application framework ever, I'm a bit frustrated that Google still ranks the old trails.dev.java.net site way higher than our current trailsframework.org, even though we switched over a year ago and Trails has matured quite a bit since the early days. Linking to old material might be confusing for newcomers that are looking for a better way to implement web applications. What you can do, is to link to http://trailsframework.org and make sure you change/remove the old links. Thanks 
