From database to ?

[Ashton]

Seems like the more time I spend with XDoclet, the more I appreciate it.
(If the documentation actually explained things rather than just listing
them that would be nice too, but one can't have everything. )

What it's made me consider is how much time I spend writing code that's
essentially a re-expression of information that already exists in some
other machine-readable form. For example, many applications start with
a database schema...maybe it already exists, maybe it's part of the
spec....

It should be possible to derive reasonable starting points for data
entry and reports as HTML or JSP/Struts pages by analyzing the DB meta
information. Since I can remember FoxPro doing it about a dozen years
ago, I'm assuming there's not a great deal of magic involved.

Before I get sidetracked into writing my own, are there existing tools
that do this?

 

[Angus]

It should be possible to derive reasonable starting points for data
entry and reports as HTML or JSP/Struts pages by analyzing the DB meta
information. Since I can remember FoxPro doing it about a dozen years
ago, I'm assuming there's not a great deal of magic involved.

Before I get sidetracked into writing my own, are there existing tools
that do this?

Perhaps the following will be helpful:

http://www.castor.org

http://www.hibernate.org/

Good Luck,
Avi.

 

[Michael Borgwardt]

It should be possible to derive reasonable starting points for data
entry and reports as HTML or JSP/Struts pages by analyzing the DB meta
information. Since I can remember FoxPro doing it about a dozen years
ago, I'm assuming there's not a great deal of magic involved.

Before I get sidetracked into writing my own, are there existing tools
that do this?

Yes, but as far as I know those that go as far as generating GUIs
(be they JSP or Swing) are *very* expensive. Look into "model
driven architecture".

 

[Ashton]

Perhaps the following will be helpful:

http://www.castor.org

If I try writing my own "screen generator" the DB=>XML portion of this
sounds like it might be a good stepping stone.

http://www.hibernate.org/

I see there's a plug-in for it called Middlegen that creates beans from
DBs. Extending that might be a good direction....

Thanks for the pointers.