Forge and Metawidget Discussed On JBoss Community Asylum

Metawidget, and the work we're doing with the JBoss Forge team, has gotten a nice mention on the latest episode of the JBoss Community Asylum podcast. Here's an excerpt (taken from 35m.22s):

Max: "Right now if you download Forge right now, you get a JSF Metawidget thing"

Lincoln: "Right you get a default scaffolding provider we call them, and that one right now is using - like you said - JSF and Metawidget which we're actually working on the next version of, so that... right now when you run the scaffold it basically looks at your database objects, your JPA objects, it runs through them all and generates a bunch of view files for the Create, Read, Update, Delete operations. You know, a simple interface."

Max: "So this is kind of like what seam-gen did before, right?"

Lincoln: "Right. Kind of like that. And when you look at the output of the scaffold that you would download, maybe from Beta 3, you will see this Metawidget tag and Metawidget is..."

Max: "Yeah why don't you just tell what Metawidget is?"

Lincoln: "Metawidget is a really cool framework actually, it..."

Emmanuel: "We should interview... er... forgot his name..."

Max: "Richard? Richard something? Kennard"

Lincoln: "Richard Kennard"

Max: "Yeah Kennard"

Lincoln: "...it's a really cool framework for, basically you just point this tag at an Object or a bean and it runs through that bean and looks at all the properties and builds up an interface that shows up on the page."

Max: "Yeah, and in your JSF you just have one [line] and say this is the bean I want to do and it builds the UI. And it does it for... er... Swing, and..."

Lincoln: "You can do Swing, you can do GWT, you can do JavaFX I think. Lots of stuff."

Max: "So actually it is pretty powerful, but it's not..."

Lincoln: "The problem is then you've got this tag in there and it's... if you want to customize that then you're learning the Metawidget framework. And so what we are doing right now actually is we're customizing Metawidget so that, using the same inspection process that Metawidget provides, generate real code. Materializes it into real XML, real JSF pages. Then you can go in and modify those pages just like you would have done by yourself."

Listen to the full podcast here.