[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