We have a server application that exposes a certain model, and set of services built on that model, to a particular client UI through a number of protocols. This is the kind of server application where, once it’s set-up, there’s not much manual intervention required. However, once in a while (particularly when the solution is first deployed), there will have to be some creation and linking of certain model objects.
This solution is built on Spring, Spring MVC and Hibernate (amongst other things) using JPA annotations for the ORM stuff.
My question: does anyone know of a framework that will allow me to very quickly set-up (ideally purely through configuration) a web interface to manage (CRUD) entities? This doesn’t have to be fancy, and doesn’t need to have fancy security (I can handle security from within the application server). It would however need to be able to handle complex relations between entities (collection mappings, enums, etc.).
For example: the application has an entity User, which has the typical Role entity associated with it (each user has 1 Role). Right now, the only way to define this without creating our own web layer from scratch is:
- Create SQL statements to import new users (and their roles)
- Have some kind of script (using Ant, for example) that uses the Spring/Hibernate configuration to associate and save a new Role() and User() object
Obviously it would be easier if we had a basic web interface (that we don’t need to develop ourselves) that comes with the server to handle these kind of tasks (creating, updating, deleting, …).
Naked Objects, OpenXava and Spring Roo, all can do what you are looking for.