And indeed, there are solutions that do this. The most notable being http://www.nakedobjects.org. The drawback with these solutions is they necessarily create very generic UIs, which bear little resemblance to how they would have appeared and functioned had they been designed by hand, with due consideration to their problem domain. For example, with Naked Objects you get this...
...which is simply not how many clients want their apps to look.
Good UI design is both art and science. When you try to 'fill in the gap' you realize there's a lot of 'art' in that gap, and trying to automate that art results in less effective UIs.
So Metawidget is not trying to be that solution. I believe that solution is less useful for many real world apps. Instead, Metawidget tries to identify the bounds between where UI generation can be useful and practical and where it becomes too generic and impractical, and stays within those bounds. I call these the 'Useful Bounds of Generation'.
Staying within the Useful Bounds of Generation lets you apply Metawidget to a large category of real world applications that fully automated CRUD solutions simply aren't interested in. You can even retrofit an existing app and remove lots of your boilerplate code.
