[seam-dev] Re: FormBuilder seam-gen extension announcement

[Gavin King]

Hi, Tomas, fwding to seam-dev list.

Perhaps you would also like to share this work in the user forum?

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 7:02 AM, Tomas Cerny <tom.cerny at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Gavin King,
>
> I have developed a new tool for view form generation from entity beans that
> I think would be very useful for Seam developers.  I would like to get your
> feedback on the tool and ideas if you have time.  If you like my tool, I
> would like to discuss how we can best provide it to the Seam community.
> Here are details...
>
> I am a graduate student and ICPC frontend developer working on application
> that is build on JSF, facelets, Hibernate, Spring and Acegi.
> My research is in the next generation web application frameworks for the
> next generation of our application.
>
> Seam is great framework, and I love developing with it.  I started with
> seam-gen and am continuing with manual development.
> It is great for generation of a starter application, but its customization
> abilities are limited.  If I try to customize code generated by seam-gen, I
> can no longer regenerate.
>  Another problem that I had with seam-gen is that it generates forms with
> basic input components and does not offer any customization.  For example,
> for properties of an enumerate type, seam-gen's form field is an input text
> field; however, what I want is a drop-down list of the enumerated type
> values.
>
> To address these problems, I have developed a tool called FormBuilder that
> can fully generate view forms from entity beans and offers complete
> customization of input fields. My tool uses Hibernate-Validation
> (annotations). Developers can even define their own input components for
> form generation.  When the input components are wrapped as facelet tag, it
> can offer even more!
>
> Some features:
>
> The tool is completely configurable using annotations and XML.
> Each generated form can function in either read-only or editable model,
> depending on the "editable" attribute.
>
> The form uses configuration-by-exception for its field rendering for
> security
> Forms may be referenced by Facelets tags to decrease application coupling.
> Tool forces good practice for code management (different users same style)
> Entity field property propagation to the form allows client-side validation
> I provide two tag libraries with client-side validation and new input
> component types like Password, Link, Html, ColorPicker. (The first library
> is Seam+RichFaces, and the second library is simple JSF.)
> I also created new field annotations like (password, link, html,
> javaScriptPattern, formOrder) for complete form generation.
> Form creation and maintenance is completely handled by the tool.  After
> entity bean updates, "fresh" forms are autogenerated to match.
>  More information is available here:
>
> http://cs.ecs.baylor.edu/~cerny/formBuilder/guide.html
>
> I have also built an example application showing new components and client
> side validation (tested on 5 main browsers!)
>  It offers also comparison to forms generated by seam-gen.
>
> You can experiment with the application by going to
> http://fire.ecs.baylor.edu:8080/FormBuilderExample/home.seam (not
> official/private)
>
> Currently, you can download FormBuilder from
> http://cs.ecs.baylor.edu/~cerny/formBuilder/download.  Later I am planning
> to put it on SourceForge.net.
>
> I welcome any feedback (even bad) on this work.
>
> Tomas
>
>
>



-- 
Gavin King
gavin.king at gmail.com
http://hibernate.org
http://jboss.com/products/seam
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Gavin