One thing I was planning on discussing with Lincoln and the Forge
roadmap is around the idea of "Forge as a 4GL" - at the moment it feels mostly
like a static code generator - which has the problem of schema changes. But Forge as a
4GL could be more responsive, almost "runtime" code generation. More like what
you get in the Rails world. :-)
This is exactly where I hope Forge will *not* go.
Mixing up the toolside with the runtime side is what tech like Spring Roo does and its my
opinion an utter mess and confusion and very hard tech lock-in.
But Forge could be great in using stuff like MetaWidget on runtime side, complete
hibernate tools support for partial reverse engineering and have the code generation be
able to handle incremental changes with something like jmerge would be able to provide
alot of bang for the buck.
On runtime side it could be interesting if a runtime framework could find a good balance
between runtime generation and still being static enough to be useful with CDI and similar
frameworks which
can be validated/inspected much easier than pure runtime stuff like Roo or Rails.
/max