Will Iverson's Blog

Announcing BeanView 1.0

I've been working on an open source framework for some time now, which I have now released as BeanView 1.0. It can be downloaded from:
http://www.beanview.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/beanview/

Briefly, BeanView allows you to create forms from your POJO + JDK 1.5 Annotations models. It supports generating forms for both Swing and Echo 2 user interfaces. No code generation is required - the form is generated entirely via reflection.

For example, let's say that you want a form for an Order, which is based on a com.example.Order JavaBean ("POJO"). Simply add the BeanView Swing panel to your app, pass in an instance of the Order, and you will automatically get a user interface form (complete with validation) based on the Order class properties and annotations.

Supported features include:
* Per visual widget error reporting
* Support for validation (both a variety of built-in validation types and an easy customization system)
* Support for a wide range of built-in data types
* Support for complex data models, such a mapping a collection to multiple selection list box, with custom factory methods via annotations
* Automatic configuration based on JavaBean meta-data (for example, if a JavaBean declares a get/setFoo(int input) method, will by default generate a text field with integer validation).

BeanView is intended to serve as a natural complement to the EJB 3.0 Persistence model and/or Hibernate or other "POJO"-based persistence frameworks.

The release notes include the following information:

1.0 What Is Beanview?
2.0 Requirements
3.0 Trying Beanview Out
4.0 Getting Started Programming With Beanview
5.0 For More Information
6.0 License

This release includes the source, built javadoc, and binaries (JAR files). You can drop pre-built WAR files into your application server to try out the Echo 2 implementation, or quickly launch the Swing demos.

I'd be very curious to get feedback from java.net folks. I have experimented by dropping the Swing implementation into the NetBeans form designer as well as the Eclipse form designer, and it seems to work well. What other features would you need? I've looked at JSF + Creator support, but so far I've been happy with Echo 2.

In any event, take a look, play around with the demos, let me know what you think.

Cheers,
-Will

Comments

• This sounds a lot like the Naked Objects framework. The idea behind NO is to emphasize Direct Manipulation instead of Model View Controller. This puts the business objects right in the hands of the end user rather than wraping them in some view that gets in the way of the user's creativity.

  Posted by: mcrocker on June 08, 2006 at 07:18 PM

• Seems very interesting, yet I cannot access the documentation, the link always time out. Maybe it's better if you publish the docs out of cvs too :-)

  I know I can download the full stuff, but I'm lazy, I was hoping to get a broad idea of what the code looks like quickly.

  Posted by: aaime on June 09, 2006 at 02:34 AM

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