Beating Rails in its own game (5-minute movie on Seam Eclipse Tools)
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007Can you write a complete CRUD web application for 8 inter-linked database tables in 5 minutes? The application needs to support
* 1-1-, 1-n, n-n associations (navigation and search)
* Composite keys in tables
* Search on any column
* Paged search result list
* Automatic required input fields based on database schema
* AJAX-based input validation
* Rich UI widgets for Date/Time
* Ready-made access security infrastructure (just add login logic using Java code)
* Completely CSS and XHTML based layout
Now, can you do that with Java?
With the newly announced Red Hat Developer Studio and JBoss Seam, you can do all the above with a few mouse clicks! Here is a 5-minutes flash movie to illustrate how it is done:
If you prefer command line tools over GUI tools in Eclipse, the good news is that all the above features are available from command line ANT scripts as well. Checkout Seam Gen documentation.
The demo is a very small part of a 4-hour tutorial Ram Venkataraman, James Williams, Max Rydahl Andersen, and Max Katz put together for EclipseCon 2007. The complete tutorial covers JBoss Eclipse tools for server management, Seam Gen, database browsing, database query analyzer, Facelets visual editing, business process editor, rules editor, and much more. We will probably make the entire tutorial available online on JBoss web sites after we have a chance to polish it.