Framework

The Idea

After writing thousands of lines of code to describe database tables and gui code I thought to myself that there must be a better way to write applications. While working with Hibernate I noticed that it gets all data which is needed to create database tables out of “plan old java objects” (POJOs). Hibernate uses reflection to define the database tables, to load data into the POJOs and save it back to the database.

So I thought to myself “If Hibernate gets everything it needs from the POJOs, then maby this works for me too for generating user interfaces!”. And this is exactly what this framework is about. Define both database schema and gui with POJOs and reduce the effort to produce an Ajax Application dramatically.

The Technology

One thing that I wanted to achieve with the new framework was platform independence. Which doesn’t only mean it should run on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and so on but it should be able to run on top of multiple databases and application servers. By using standard technologies such as Java2EE and Hibernate the applications should be able to be deployed on any application server which complies to the Java2EE specification and on any database which is supported by Hibernate.

For the user interface I use the ZK-Framework which I have already been using the past three years. I worked with many frameworks in the past 4 years and neither GWT nor Dojo or anything else allowed me to get as productive as ZK does.

Current Status

The project is nearly feature complete and as soon as I have fixed the blocking bugs I will release the first preview version of this framework!