Better Than Free: Metawidget v0.65

There was a time, years ago, when just having a $0 price tag on a piece of software would have sparked people's interest. Nowadays, the success of Open Source has meant that free is not enough.

For a new software project to be noticed, it doesn't just have to be free: it has to be well documented, well tested, have plenty of working examples, an attractive Web site and high quality code. And even then the competition is fierce: developers are busy people, and have very limited time to evaluate new technologies.

So the big feature in the new release of Metawidget, aside from a number of upgrades and enhancements (such as Commons Validator support), is a Live Demo that lets you immediately get in and start playing and coding with Metawidget. I'm hoping it's a great way to let people try it without having to download, unzip and read through the usual distribution.

The Live Demo uses an enhanced version of the Groovy 1.6 Console Applet to give you a fully working Java-like scripting environment. Everything is set up for you just to click Run. You can then fiddle with the code, even import your own business model classes on to the CLASSPATH to see how Metawidget renders them.

You can find the Live Demo here:

http://metawidget.org/live-demo

Also, special thanks to Gerardo Diazcorujo and Ryan Cornia for their help testing this release. Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please let us know what you think.

Metawidget gets Groovy

Update: the APIs shown in this blog entry have changed slightly in newer releases of Metawidget. Specifically <propertystyle> now takes a PropertyStyle instance, not a class name. Please download the latest documentation from http://metawidget.org

The latest release of Metawidget adds supports for Groovy. This means Metawidget's Inspectors can now inspect GroovyBean properties for types and annotations.

GroovyBean properties are similar to JavaBean's getters/setters. Indeed, at compile time, GroovyBean properties try to 'look' like JavaBean properties by automatically generating a private member variable and a public getter/setter.

So, if your Groovy code says this...

class Booking {
   @NotNull
   String creditCard;
}

...at compile-time Groovy generates this:

class Booking {
   @NotNull
   private String mCreditCard;

   public String getCreditCard() {
      return mCreditCard;
   }

   public void setCreditCard(String creditCard) {
      mCreditCard = creditCard;
   }
}

Notice, however, that the annotation stays on the private member variable - it does not get applied to the getter. There are good reasons for this, but it means Metawidget's native JavaBeanPropertyStyle cannot be used to find those annotations.

So, instead, Metawidget now has a pluggable GroovyPropertyStyle that understands Groovy properties natively. To use it, you just need to update your inspector-config.xml...

<propertytypeinspector xmlns="java:org.metawidget.inspector.propertytype"
   config="org.metawidget.inspector.impl.BasePropertyInspectorConfig">
   <propertystyle>org.metawidget.inspector.impl.propertystyle.groovy.GroovyPropertyStyle</propertystyle>
</propertytypeinspector>

How does this work in practice? See for yourself! The Metawidget download includes a Seam Groovy Booking sample application, that showcases using Metawidget with Groovy. It's covered in detail in the reference guide.