Tapestry 5.4 alpha 3 migration

[Denis Delangle <de...@gmail.com>]

Dear community,

We are happy Tapestry users since Tapestry 5.1 and we would like to
share how we migrated from Tapestry 5.3 to 5.4 alpha 3.

We previously used Tapestry-jquery to have a javascript layer in
jquery but without using their rich components. This library is great
but with Tapestry 5.4 we don't need it anymore as we have jquery
directly available in Tapestry.
On the server side, the migration was easy, we had only to modify the
services we override when the api had changed.
On the client side, obviously it was more difficult. We refactored our
javascript code to be managed by requirejs. It's the only way to
include Tapestry modules.

We know that it's only an alpha release but we would have found it
easier if there were more documentation, or something like that, about
the JavaScript differences between Tapestry 5.3 and 5.4. Maybe some
snapshot releases of the documentation could help in the future ?
For instance event names are no more constants of Tapestry object but
can be found in the events module.

We had to modify our selenium tests because waitPageToLoad doesn't
wait for all requirejs modules to be loaded.
We used that type of code to be sure page is loaded.
                waitForPageToLoad();

waitForCondition("selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].hasAttribute('data-page-initialized')","10000");

With the new asset urls with checksum folders, we are losing
efficiency during JS debug. With chrome developer tools, in sources
tab, finding the file we are looking for is difficult if we have
several files in the same folder. Futhermore, if we modify a JS file,
the editor is closed in chrome (as the url change) and we have to set
the breakpoints again.

In Tapestry 5.3 we used FormInjector, but now, it's said that "A
replacement is forthcoming." Have you an idea about what will be this
replacement ? and/or an estimated date of replacement ?

For now we have several issues that we have run into and that we hope
they will be fixed soon.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAP5-1741
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAP5-2110
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAP5-2106
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TAP5-2060

Beside these issues, we have no problem using 5.4, it seems really stable.

Thank you all for your work and your investment for Tapestry users, we
hope this email can help people migrating.

Denis and Julien

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