I've seen Eitan Suez at
work on this for a while. He has been passionate about it and I?ve seen earlier
versions of his ?baby? product at various stages. On Friday night, Eitan demoed JMatter for
a bunch of
us who gathered after the NFJS
Des Moines show.
If you spend quite some time developing UI applications in Java and want to quickly
put together your
application, then JMatter can help a great deal. JMatter is metadata driven?you derive
your domain
class from a JMatter class, declare some properties, write a little configuration,
and then sit back and
see the UI in action for your app. Quite a few basic or commonly expected functionalities
(like user
management) is readily available out of the box.
One of the things that makes JMatter pretty interesting is its origin. I am not a
big fan of design by
committee. We?ve seen examples of frameworks that have come out of committee which
have
standardized or productized before innovation. JMatter, on the other hand, was inspired
by the concept
of Naked Objects and emerged
as a framework from a real application Eitan has been building for real
work. There are some Real nice concepts in it that we see now in otheR fRamewoRks
(you get it).
Eitan realizes a few areas that can be improved (like all products). The small amount
of configuration
that is needed can be further minimized or eliminated with some exploration of metadata.
During the
demo we were throwing at him quite a few ?why not?? and he was quick to responds to
those. For one
question, his quick answer was ?Yes, that is a good idea, so on the flight up here
I implemented that??
and quickly showed that in action!
If you are building Java UI applications, check out the screen snapshot or demo for yourself.
(Disclaimer: I saw his live demo in Des Moines and had not seen the demo he had posted
on the web.
After writing this blog, I found out that I?m appearing in his demo. Opinion expressed
here about JMatter
has absolutely nothing to do with that. Had I known Eitan will pop my picture, I would
have sent him
a better picture with my glasses! :) )
