Why does Tapestry use Prototype? Why not insert favorite JavaScript library here?
An important goal for Tapestry is seamless DHTML and Ajax integration. To serve that goal, it was important that the built in components be capable of Ajax operations, such as dynamically re-rendering parts of the page. Because of that, it made sense to bundle a well-known JavaScript library as part of Tapestry. At the time (this would be 2006-ish), Prototype and Scriptaculous were well known and well documented, and jQuery was just getting started. The intent has always been to make this aspect of Tapestry pluggable. This is work expected in Tapestry 5.3, where a kind of adapter layer will be introduced so that Tapestry can be easily customized to work with any of the major JavaScript libraries.
