Inspiration

I had started Buccoo after looking at the OpenLaszlo blueprint application LZProject and its implementation. I felt the LZProject overcomplicated certain things and wasn't as clean as I would have liked it.

With the LZProject, the back end development wasn't as transparent as I envisioned it should be and could easily lead to difficulties in development and testing for larger scale projects. I didn't see it being an easy task to test the front end and back end separately.

On the plus side, the LZProject had a nice design pattern for the form processing and I have tried to incorporate the pattern into the Buccoo project.

Tapestry 5 itself has some Rich Internet Application functionality but the extent of the capabilities is hard to match when compared to OpenLaszlo. The Tapestry 5 DHTML doesn't seem to provide elements such as windows, menus, dragging and dropping etc.

Below is the idea behind the model for the Buccoo project.

The diagram is a scribbling on a notepad that my girlfriend did while I was explaining it to her. The blob that's the user (no offence heh) says "give me page". Using the OpenLaszlo user interface a http/https request is sent to the web server which has Tapestry running as an application. It's Buccoo with Tapestry as its base, but you get the idea. The Tapestry based application code queries the database if necessary and merges the results it gets with the proper template. The result is then returned to the OpenLaszo user interface where the user can use the results.