Metawidget: UI generation done right

Many software projects spend a significant portion of time developing the User Interface (UI). To save time, developers reach for interactive graphical specification tools and model-based generation tools. But, inherently, these approaches require software developers to restate information that's already encoded elsewhere in the application and/or maintain piles of machine-generated code, all of which is laborious and error prone.

This talk presents a more sound approach using Metawidget. Metawidget is a smart User Interface widget that populates itself, at runtime, with UI components to match the properties of your business objects. Metawidget does this without introducing new technologies. It inspects your existing back-end architecture (such as JavaBeans, annotations, XML configuration files) and creates widgets native to your existing UI framework (such as JavaServer Faces, Android, Swing, etc).

While great progress has been made in recent years eliminating unnecessary code in other parts of the programming stack, nobody has focused on eliminating manual UI creation tasks. Developers are still hand-coding their UI forms: dragging and dropping widgets, or writing out tags. Come learn how to break out of the rut!

About Dan Allen

Dan is an open source advocate, community catalyst, software generalist, author and speaker. Most of the time, he's hacking using some JVM language. He leads the Asciidoctor project and serves as the community liaison for Arquillian. He builds on these experiences to help make a variety of open source projects wildly successful, including Asciidoctor, Arquillian, Opal and JBoss Forge.

Dan is the author of Seam in Action (Manning, 2008) and has written articles for NFJS, the Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Java Tech Journal and JAXenter. He's also an internationally recognized speaker, having presented at major software conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, NFJS, UberConf, RWX, JAX and jFokus. He's recognized as a JavaOne Rock Star and Java (JVM) Champion.

After a long conference day, you'll likely find Dan geeking out about technology, documentation and testing with fellow community members over a Trappist beer or Kentucky Bourbon.

More About Dan »