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
As Principal Software Engineer at JBoss, by Red Hat, Dan serves as the JBoss Community liaison, leads the JBoss Testing Initiative and is a member of the Seam, Weld, Arquillian and ShrinkWrap projects. He authored Seam in Action (Manning), served as a representative for Red Hat on the JSR-314 Expert Group (JSF 2.0), writes for IBM developerWorks and NFJS magazine and is an internationally recognized speaker. He's appeared at major industry conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, NFJS, JAX and Jazoon and has received recognition as a JavaOne Rock Star, a JBossWorld Top Presenter and a JAX Hall of Fame speaker.
To colleagues, Dan's known for his hard work and passion for Open Source technologies. His technical expertise includes Java frameworks (Seam, CDI, Weld, JSF, EJB 3, JPA, Hibernate, Spring), testing frameworks (Arquillian, JUnit, TestNG, Selenium), build tools (Maven 2, Gradle, Ant) and web development (Ajax, JavaScript, CSS) and more.
You can keep up with Dan's discoveries by reading his blogs at http://mojavelinux.com and http://community.jboss.org/people/dan.j.allen/blog or tracking what he's currently up to by following him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mojavelinux.
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