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Mod4j (Modeling for Java) is an open source DSL-based environment for developing administrative enterprise applications. It uses a collection of DSL's to model different parts of the architecture, combined with manually written code. Currently Mod4j consists of four DSLs: the Business Domain DSL, Service DSL, Data Contract DSL and Presentation DSL. The modeling environment is seamlessly integrated into the Eclipse IDE which gives the developers one environment where they can easily switch back- and forth between models and code. The different DSL?s used in Mod4j can be used independently, but if they are used in collaboration they will be fully validated with each other. Apart from integration in the Eclipse IDE, Mod4j also supports the use of Maven. That is, using the DSL models as the source, the complete code generation process can be run automatically on a build server without the need for Eclipse. The Mod4j DSLs and the corresponding code generators are based on a reference architecture. This allows developers to model various aspects of the application and generate code that strictly follows this reference architecture. The reference architecture is described in a separate document. For a good understanding of the generated code it is useful to read this document.

"JSwat is a graphical Java debugger front-end, written to use the Java Platform Debugger Architecture and based on the NetBeans Platform. JSwat is open-source software and is freely available in both binary and source code form. Its features include sophisticated breakpoints; colorized source code display with code navigator; byte code viewer; movable display panels showing threads, call stack, visible variables, and loaded classes; command interface for more advanced features; and Java-like expression evaluation, including method invocation. "

"Let's imagine we want to create an application for orders. People can sign in to the system, place orders for various items, check out and have them sent to their address. Very simple, but we can show a lot of things here. As we expect to be writing more than one application of this type and as we also would like to be able to express the structure of the application on a business level (one of the major drivers for DSLs and MDSD for that matter), we come up with the idea of using a DSL to describe what the application does. Defining the DSL is what we did last week. This week, we need to map the concepts of the DSL to some code and some APIs we're going to program against. So, we're going to create a set of code templates for a code generator that can then read our DSL models and create persistence code for us."

WindowBuilder Pro (also known as just WindowBuilder) is a powerful and easy to use bi-directional Java GUI designer. It is composed of SWT Designer, Swing Designer and GWT Designer and makes it very easy to create Java GUI applications without spending a lot of time writing code to display simple forms. With WindowBuilder Pro you can create complicated windows in minutes. Use the visual designer and Java code will be generated for you. You can easily add controls using drag-and-drop, add event handlers to your controls, change various properties of controls using a property editor, internationalize your app and much more.

Data, Context and Interaction (DCI) is a paradigm used in computer software to program systems of communicating objects. Its goals are: To improve the readability of object-oriented code by giving system behavior first-class status; To cleanly separate code for rapidly changing system behavior (what the system does) from code for slowly changing domain knowledge (what the system is), instead of combining both in one class interface; To help software developers reason about system-level state and behavior instead of only object state and behavior; To support an object style of thinking that is close to peoples' mental models, rather than the class style of thinking that overshadowed object thinking early in the history of object-oriented programming languages. The paradigm separates the domain model (Data) from Use cases (Context) and Roles that objects play (Interaction). DCI is complementary to Model-view-controller (MVC). MVC as a pattern language is still used to separate the data and its processing from presentation. DCI was invented by Trygve Reenskaug, also the inventor of MVC. The current formulation of DCI is mostly the work of Reenskaug and James O. Coplien.

"red-open is a sister project of redView. red-open is providing a Software Factory to transform models and generate code. red-open uses Eclipse Modeling (MWE, Xpand, Xtend to transform Domain Models (EMF, UML, XSD, Xtext) into other models like redView View Models. red-open also generates code and artifacts to generate RCP Prototyping apps, SWT Views, MockUp, Riena Navigation Assembly... "

Vaadin is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) framework for RIA applications. I only know it for a few months but since I started experimenting with it, I'm really in favor of it. I see a lot of advantages compared to Sun's Java EE standard front-end framework JSF. First of all Vaadin is a java library, so you only have to write Java to build a complete frontend. No need for a specific frontend language, no need for converters (for comboboxes),… This also implies that you can use the full Java power on the frontend side and that's an huge advantage because frontend code is now type-safe and easily refactorable. You can unit test your frontend with JUnit. You can also use all existing java libraries on the frontend side, for example LOG4J. Another advantage is the fact that Vaadin is easy to learn (JSF isn't!) and to use: it's straigtforward. It feels like developing desktop apps and for me developing desktop apps feels much more intuitive than developing web-apps the way I'm used to. Vaadin uses convention over configuration. No need to register new components, validators or whatever in different xml files. Themes have a default folder and a default folder structure. Vaadin is very well documented. There's the book of Vaadin wich explains every aspect of the framework very clear. On the site there's a blog, a FAQ section, a wiki, a forum, examples with Java source code, … It's very easy to extend. Want to create your own Validator? Just implement an interface or extend another Validator and use it. Want to create your own custom server side component? Just extend the CustomComponent class or extend from another component. There's also an add-on directory where you can download UI components, data components, tools, themes, …

I am working on a web site that will help students practice their Scala programming skills. As I labored along, writing my JSF app code, I thought "this is silly-why not practice Scala at the same time?" But I like JSF and wasn't ready to jump to Lift or Vaadin. With Eclipse, this isn't all that hard. Install the Java plugin. Make a dynamic web project in the usual way, using the Java EE perspective. Then, switch to the Scala perspective, right-click on the project, and, if all planets are aligned correctly, you will get a menu item "Add Scala nature". (If they are not, see here for a manual approach.) Add your managed beans as Scala classes. Finally, switch back to the Java EE perspective, select the project properties, and add the Scala library JAR as a Java EE module dependency. But I like NetBeans and wasn't ready to switch to Eclipse. (Unfortunately, JSF 2 support in Eclipse is pretty minimal, the Glassfish integration is a bit flaky, and the Scala plugin has very little usable code completion.) NetBeans doesn't let me add a "Scala nature" to a web project. If I add Scala files to the project, I can edit them with the Scala editor, but they just get copied to the WAR file, without any compilation. I had one look at the Ant scripts for a Scala and a web project and decided that I wasn't going to figure out how to merge them. This blog shows how you can use Maven to make a mixed Scala/Java project in NetBeans. So I gathered up JSF and Scala pom.xml files from here and here, cut out the considerable crud from the JSF POM file that was probably meant for supporting Tomcat, and merged the results to the best of my ability-see below. You use the usual Maven directory structure, but with a src/main/scala directory instead of src/main/java:

Gaelyk is a lightweight Groovy toolkit for Google App Engine Java. Gaelyk lets you deploy small applications on Google App Engine Java. Gaelyk gives you the choice to use Groovy for developing your applications. Gaelyk builds upon Groovlets. and the Groovy template servlet Gaelyk allows you to cleanly seperate your views with Groovy templates and your actions in Groovlets. Gaelyk simplifies the usage of the Google App Engine SDK by providing more concise and more powerful shortcuts when using the datastore, memcache, the blobstore, the images service, the URL fetch service, when sending and receiving emails or Jabber messages, and much more. Gaelyk lets you define friendly REST-ful URLs thanks to its URL routing system Gaelyk provides a simple plugin system for improving code reuse and code sharing You can: download Gaelyk in the download area, learn how to create Gaelyk applications by reading the extensive tutorial, and participate in the community.

This post is to introduce the EMFT Texo project to you. The Texo project delivers code/artifact generation from ecore/xsd models for (web) server environments with additional runtime functionality. Texo aims to eventually also provide code generation solutions for the web client.

"How much can the IDE predict what you will write in the next seconds? "Code Recommenders" is a blog about ongoing research projects developing so called Framework Understanding Tools (FrUiTs for short) - or more general recommender systems that help developers to deal with the complexity of today's software development. It has a strong focus on new Eclipse based tools and discusses/presents ideas how to overcome issues with current IDEs."

"JAX-WS Reference Implementation Project. This project provides the core of Metro project, inside GlassFish community This project develops and evolves the code base for the reference implementation of the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) specification. The current code base supports JAX-WS 2.0 and JAXWS 2.1 but the project will track future versions of the JAX-WS specifications."

"Short screencasts that outlines features of applause, a domain-specific language (DSL) and code generator to produce native apps for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. You can find this open-source project at code.google.com/​p/​applause"

"Clojure functional programming language for JVM has powerful mind-bending features. The feature that interests me the first time is its ability to "execute data as code". As demonstrated here, were I define a function process that basically executes the symbol processor with whatever params : => (defn process [& params] (eval (cons processor params))) #'user/process "

"Counterclockwise is an Eclipse plugin helping developers write Clojure code. Installing Counterclockwise and starting testing/developing in clojure is really just a matter of minutes!"

"Code Generation is better than Model Interpretation in Model-Driven Development? In my latest blog post I add my point of view to the topic "Code Generation vs Model Interpretation"."

" Over the past few years, and actually the past year, a lot of new initiatives have surfaced in the area of creating so called language workbenches - aiming at facilitating the definition and use of DSLs and code generation. We believe each of these has its own strengths and weaknesses, and none is 'the best' for every purpose. Still, a lot of people keep asking for the best workbench. Based on that, we are now planning to have a Language Workbench Competition, in which we will be able to compare the strengths and weaknesses of these workbenches based on solutions for a predefined set of cases. Keep an eye on this page for more details in the coming, as the cases are being defined and the possibilities of co-hosting this initative at Code Generation 2011 in Cambridge are being investigated."

Acceleo is a pragmatic implementation of the Object Management Group (OMG) MOF Model to Text Language (MTL) standard. You do not need to be an expert to start using the plug-ins and create your first code generator : using the provided example projects and the powerful completion feature of the Acceleo editor, it is very easy to get started and understand the basic principles.

"Cross platform mobile development toolkit consisting of a DSL for defining mobile apps and code generators for creating native apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and Google App Engine. Based on Eclipse and Xtext."

"Developers usually have their programs write log and debug information to the standard output during coding and testing. This results in a lot of text being printed to Eclipse's console view, often more than can be easily surveyed. Since at any given time, only a small part of this information is of primary interest to the developer, a tool which highlights specific lines or words can significantly increase the readability of this output. Grep Console allows you to define a series of regular expressions which will be tested against the console output. Each expression matching a line will affect the style of either the entire line or parts of it. For example, error messages could be set to show up with a red background, or integer values showing the state of a certain variable could be rendered in bold font. "