In a recent trend of technologies being used as verbs (think _googling_, and err, well something else) of late I have been mostly Naked Objecting. For those who don’t know, “Naked Objects”:http://www.nakedobjects.org/ is a framework which allows the developer to quickly roll an application which provides both a UI and persistence layer simply by coding a domain model (for a better overview see ” Introduction To Naked Objects”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/07/15/nakedaddress.html over at Java.net). Thats the good side.
That bad side is that the built in default ‘lightweight’ UI just plain sucks. It makes heavy use of drag and drop which is not in itself a bad thing, however its a jolt for those users more used to a standard UI, and no non-drag and drop alternatives are provided. It is also ugly, and not that intuitive. Luckily, Naked Objects make it fairly easy to roll your own UI for it, something I’ve been playing around with over the last few days.
Its at its early stages right now, and I’m not sure how much more I’m going to do with it – at present I’ve used the development of this new UI layer as a learning excerise to get to grips with Naked Object’s internals (which it has to be said is quite badly documented). At this stage I have a Swing-based UI using JGoodies “Form”:http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/forms/index.html and “Looks”:http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/looks/index.html components, in an attempt to provide a good looking auto-generated UI. I may post more on JGoodies @FormLayout@ at a later date – its fast becoming my favourite way to layout just about anything. If I continue with it, the overall aim will be to provide a very good looking, easy to use auto-generated UI, but to also allow the developer to tailor specific parts of the UI or even replace them altogether.
magpiebrain 
4 Responses to “Naked Objecting”
I am sure I posted a comment here earlier ….
mmmm that’s strange.
Well – I didn’t delete anything!
Ooooo that’s good to hear ^.^”
I was afraid that you got annoyed by my post.My post was a selfish rambling on how painful it is to stitch java’s frameworks together.
Some time it is just difficult to keep up with the available frameworks, struts, velocity, hibernate, etc etc
Dont you wish sun should take all this framework and unified it into its J2EE distribution package ? Make it easier for developers to do J2EE.
Thats kind of what Matt Riable has done with his excellent “AppFuse”:http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?anchor=ann_appfuse_1_5_released project.
The only thing NakedObjects really replaces is the need for a persistence layer and the UI stuff – and the framework is more about the NakedObject approach – of which more later.