Tuesday, August 01, 2006

The Fact of the JMatter

Several years ago, some brilliant designers created Naked Objects, a Java framework that generates applications from domain objects. You supply the POJOs with behavior, point Naked Object at them, and you have a full-blown Swing application that allows you to edit, insert, delete, and browse the objects and their relationships. You could literally create sparse, functional applications in minutes. However, Naked Objects never got much beyond a proof of concept. The automatically generated applications were utilitarian but uninspiring.

Fast forward to now. Eitan Suez, one of my fellow No Fluff, Just Stuff
speakers, has taken the Naked Object idea and run with it. He has created the JMatter framework (found here). It takes the concepts of Naked Objects and updates it to the here and now. JMatter applications still auto-generate from POJOs, but the user interface and interactions are very rich. The sample application that appears on the JMatter web site literally took less than 2 hours to create; written by hand, it equates to developer-weeks worth of effort. It also illustrates a growing trend in development: creating framework and scaffolding code automatically, freeing developers to focus more on producing applications. We've seen this approach done well in Ruby on Rails. JMatter shows that you can apply the same concepts to Swing development. Eitan has released JMatter with a MySQL-style license, so it's worth jumping over to his site to get a preview of the future.

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