Have finished building the test webapp, solved the component problem. The missing piece in the puzzle was provided by this site. My first disappointment in tapestry, component parameters it seems have to be read manually

IBinding binding = (IBinding)getBinding("heading");

but I think that is fixed in Tapestry 4.

Now to get on and do up the reports and articles

Very happy with progress. Have taken as an example problem to re-implement lists.peacocktech.com using tapestry. So far I have the main page up, with the additional feature of listing public lists, the page to view all posts in a list, and the view of a single message. Yet do be done are emailing of messages, and I would also like to (now that I have some idea how after coding mailfile.peacocktech.com) have the system read in the multi-part mime sections, and present them in the correct format (image/text/html/downloadable file), but this is not required for the purposes of ITC382. I would like to explore before I wrap up this assignment is splitting the email message view off into a separate component, so it can be embedded into future applications, such as the webmail project I would like to complete.

Have been relying mostly on the object reference. Have learnt today a feature of Java5 that I knew existed, but haven't used yet, "for each" loops for iterable objects and arrays, fun fun fun in Java.

Figured out some actual java coding in tapestry today, linking templates to classes. Reading the tapestry philosophy in wondered how much of the "plumbing" tapestry would handle, and thus far it has exceeded my expectations. Unlike servlets/jsp, it seems you dont need to worry about creating session objects, you just use "this", tapestry will keep track of the changes made and restore them when the same user accesses the page. It also handles link actions and form processing with very little effort. (Direct)Links and forms are linked via an ognl expression, to a java method. Form fields are set automatically via similar methods (standard getters and setters). Java classes look almost as if they had nothing to do with a web-app.

References are still a problem. Have been working mainly by looking at examples from a chapter from a tutorial published by Sandcast Software, as well as sample code from the HLS/KCD tutorial and the official component reference.

After scouring the net for examples of the config files (*.page, *.jwc, *.application) I finally managed to get a working app with a page and a component. No dynamic content yet, I need to add a few methods to a Java class first, as soon as I find out the naming scheme.

Found a new plugin today. Palette provides a tree of components that can be dropped into a page from various librarys, saving the time needed to manually type the component specifications. It seems quite powerful looking at the demo.

Been reading through some tutorials. None of them have been a great help, but I've been looking more for references, and haven't taken the time to read the articles top to bottom. Some of them come with demo code. That might be the best way to progress, I learn well by dissecting example code.

Spent the last few days reading the tapestry tutorial (originally by Howard Lewis Ship, revised by Kevin C. Dorff), written for Tapestry-3.0-beta-3, as well as the user guide and developer guide. Setting up Tapestry-3.0.3 wasn't quite as easy. Because of licensing issues, some of the components tapestry uses can not be distributed with tapestry, so the developers have written an ant script to download and install the extra components. Had to install Apache-ANT (I had previously only used the implementation built into eclipse) to run the script, which failed when trying to download javassist. Had to update common.properties with the correct URL to get it to work.
I have an Eclipse 3.1 environment running Spindle 3.2.0, with an ant script to compile and install a war file into Apache-tomcat-4.1.30. (I can see myself using ant for all sorts of things now, quite a powerful scripting language) I hope to upgrade to tomcat 5 or 5.5 soon (depending on if I decide to try Sysdeo, will have to determine which versions it is compatible with).

Read the first few chapters of the text book today, while thinking of possible topics. This is what I came up with:

Java "school" - mensioned in a post on my blog
Email ID - I would like to write a servlet based webmail application to replace thunderbird. I have often wondered how such applications identify unique emails (when using features that leave messages on the server). I could research the topic, to find if there is a standard method, or if headers are simply analysed to determine the email is "unique enough" (for e.g., time and subject)
JSP Tags - find out exactly what jsp tag (libraries) are, and how to write, and extend them.
Java-MySQL - learn how to interface Java-MySQL eventually for use in the above mentioned webmail app.
Tapestry - research and learn how to implement the Tapestry framework.

I'm looking for something that could be used for part A and B. Email ID is possible very simple, the practical side may be limited, I already have code for receiving/processing mail. JSP tags are possibly made obsolete if I start using tapestry. Java-MySQL probably relies on a few method calls, I have already learned PHP-MySQL, its something I would still like to learn, but probably wont take too long on my own.
So, at the moment it looks like Tapestry is my topic.
I did look at tapestry once before, when I first started running Tomcat, had problems getting it running, probably due to my lack of understanding of Tomcat. Also Spindle was somewhat premature at that stage. Both tapestry and spindle have matured a lot over the last 2 years, so the time is right to re-investigate their use.

Now that i finally have a little time, i'm going to start on this XML workshop.
I have worked with XML before, mostly in Java. Have worked with Dom4J, using XML, DTDs and XPath. I spent some weeks on a project working with these, before i abandoned using XML for a database, as I found it to me far too slow, inefficient and memory consuming once I started working with larger datasets.

I have done a little work in python, but not for a long time, and not with XML. I'd love to get my hands dirty with python again.