In my spare time, which I have a lot more of because now I work close to home, i am developing an application in which I i will use the Open Social API, OpenID API and other frameworks. Now that my selection of tools and frameworks is pretty much finished, I end up with a rather elaborate domain model which evolves throughout the application development.
So, how to get my design into code quickly… Grails with Gorm would be a good option for that because this would take away much of the plumbing needed.
I tried IntelliJ with the grails framework, but IntelliJ is just a pain in the ass and does not work well with Ubuntu (right mouse context menu’s don’t work for instance) and the whole project setup is way different then I am used to (eclipse junkie). So I reverted back to eclipse and began setting up the framework I am going to use. Read some stuff about using grails with Eclipse but I was scared off by the comments found on the grails eclipse integration.
I read an article in the dutch Java magazine about Mod4J and it seems to fit in my requirements. I wanted a domain model fast with all the persistence thingies and service layer. Mod4J uses some smart easy to learn DSLs (NO DOCUMENTATION!! PLEASE FIX THAT) for modelling the domain in text (i really don’t like those visual tools because they slow you down and typing is much faster).
After some tries on the domain model, I managed to generete a complete application framework from scratch within minutes. All my hibernate mappings, domain objects, dto’s are generated and extensible without intefering with the generation part. I was surprised about the quality of the generated code and for now, i continue to use Mod4J for the development of my application model. So after one weekend Mod4J seems good for me. If it continues to suit me well, i will write some articles on how to setup your environment and write some examples on the DSL which go further than the examples on their website.
