So first Tapestry... It's an alternative Java web application framework that is now hosted on the Jakarta Apache website. I don't know if I'm reading anything into the fact that it's an Apache project right beside Struts. It just surprised me a bit.
It's certainly a lot different than Struts and maybe that's not a bad thing. I haven't seriously gotten into it yet but one of the things I like is that you don't replace HTML tags with some proprietary tags (unlike ASP, JSP, PHP, etc.). That means that you can use whatever HTML editor you want, including WYSIWYG editors. A lot of Java people I know dismiss WYSIWYG editors but I actually like them. Anything that allows me to design (in the graphical sense) without writing code can't be all bad. So far all I've done is the requisite "Hello World", but so far so good. BTW, the next version of Tapestry includes HiveMind, one of those Dependency Injection frameworks everyone loves.
As for Eclipse I borrowed a book from the library this weekend called Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins. One of the interesting things is that the authors are Kent Beck and Erich Gamma. Yes that Kent Beck and Erich Gamma! Big names in the geeky programmer realm. The book starts off with some background of Eclipse. When you use the Java IDE project within Eclipse it's so easy to forget that it was intended as a programming language neutral environment and that everything in Eclipse is a plug-in. Everything! Very cool. I already have some ideas for plug-ins but we'll see how the rest of the book goes.
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