Max, Christian – it sounds like you are saying the generator would be better off w/ the tools where it would produce hibtags, rather than co-exist w/ them? If so, is Max alright w/ introducing a dep?

I have started a feature matrix of similar apps …
http://hbm2jsf.dbyrne.net/features.xls

what kind of dep ? it would just be generating stuff, that would not create a dependency....or ?

A faces.jar for testing. A "Hello World CRUD" demo app means the dist would need it as well. Then people think "this is middleware, why a web dep.?"

An out-of-the-box demo is vital. Think like a marketing person, not a programmer. Would you have responded to my thread if it had directed you to an offline code generator and a readme.txt ?

eh - yes, I would have reacted. The online stuff I didn't even try because I could not download the source code and try to work with it - but that put aside ;)

And your dependencies makes sense, so no problem with me. Might be a separate download depending on what the demo app actually will contain. Maybe its simply just part of the tags project and not the tools ?

Lets look at that when we have something to integrate with.

/max

OK, let's move towards defining "something". Here is what I'll commit myself to, w/ or w/out help.

A new ant task that generates the following from Configuration:
A JSF CRUD form for each POJO.
A JSF "Backing Bean" for each POJO.
A JSP form for each POJO so that user's can "browse" the DB using Serge's stuff.
A sample JSF config file.

Things that will be worried about later ...
Performance
Generating user input validation.
Generating a config file with navigation rules.
A dynamic CSS switch showing everyone how easy it is to customize the result.
A full blown working app
Labels ... translate Java terms into business terms.
A dynamic CRUD tag smart enough to manage any mapped class.

Hi,

All the stuff you have there fits well into the current tools.

Please hook the ant task into the <hibernatetool> etc.

Looks like a good start!

Have any of you seen the "appfuse" project, specifically the "appgen" project in the "extras" directory - it takes hibernate pojo's, creates DAO interfaces, DAO implementation, struts (or spring, or jsf (I think)) servlet layer stuff, aswell as jsp's etc.

See: http://raibledesigns.com/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Articles

It seems to me no one mentioned trails in this thread (at least, I found no match with the forum search). It is inspired by Ruby on Rails, the Hibernate data model and a few annotations are the center of the application, everything else is dynamically generated. See:

https://trails.dev.java.net/
http://jroller.com/page/ccnelson/Weblog?catname=/Trails

Not wanting to change the topic focus but I am a particular fan of Tapestry. Trails is a nice CRUD framework that employs Tapestry and Hibernate.
Having said that JSF is likely to be the main web framework as time goes on. Better get back to Tapestry/Hibernate application I am building ......

In the tools suite, there appears to be an ability to generate DAOs . I cannot find documentation for this at http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/tools/ant/index.html or at http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/tools ... index.html .

I would like to make the managed CRUD beans delegate work to these objects. Is this solid yet?

FYI, I've hooked an hbm2jsf task into hibernatetool . XSLT has been trashed and the following is generated via VLT for each class so far: a JSP listing of all classes, a JSF listing of all instances of a class, a crud form that can manipulate each instance. A deployment descriptor, a layout scheme, and faces configuration file are complete as well. I am basically done with the view.

Here's good article about these 2 technologies
http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces/HibernateAndMyFaces

Actually, Gavin implemented the DAO generation without telling everyone :) I thought it was still the old finder generator technique. I've also written a DAO implementation that I find very nice and I'd say we should generate DAOs for JDK5 using this style. So there might be changes again in the tools wrt DAOs. You can find a discussion and a link to CVS in the CaveatEmptor forum in the thread "Generic DAOs".

Yes, your implementation should use the DAOs generated. I've got to look at Gavins stuff and see where we are going with this.

David, yes, there are still a lot of Tapestry fans out there. I've split my JsfExporter into a WebExporter(parent) & and JsfExporter(child). This way someone else can make hbm2Tapestry, hbm2Shale, etc. Serge's stuff can be inherited because it won't need an MVC framework. They could share CSS.

Cool. Ill keep an eye on whats happening and maybe (just maybe) I will add the tapestry generator.

Well, I´m developing an open source application generator for hibernate that is based in the CRUD model. It uses metamodel to store the specification and generates metadata for hibernate, jsp pages and so on.
My Idea is be able to generate form the same metamodel different technologies (EJB 3 with JSF for instance). But the current version is limited to my spare time on the stable struts and hibernate 3.x series.

http://jtri.sourceforge.net/

If someone like/hate it, please post comments on the project page.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtri