Red Hat Developer Studio
In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I'm an employee of Red Hat.
JBoss did a demo of the new combination of Exadel, Red Hat Developer Studio, and JBoss IDE at EclipseCon. The demo ran through creating a Seam based application from nothing more than a database. It used Seam-Gen, a code/descriptor generation tool included with Seam and integrated into the new development platform. In very short order, I was able to reverse engineer EJB 3 Entity Pojos, and generate a basic CRUD UI to manage all those entities. Then with just a few tags, I was able to add Ajax support to the application using the included Ajax4JSF tag libraries, as well as add in rich controls from the included RichFaces libraries. Finally, I was able to integrate BPM and Rules into the application by drawing out a business process (or coding it in XML) and then binding code to the steps in the process. I simply needed to let Seam know about the process, and it was invoked automatically from the application.
I have never really been that fond of visual editors, but I like the way that the Exadel tooling combined visual previewing of JSF Facelets pages with code editing. It helps speed development of JSF based UIs up quite a bit, and doesn't get in the way. Also the integration of the Seam and Hibernate/EJB 3 tooling makes visualizing the application quite easy.
JBoss did a demo of the new combination of Exadel, Red Hat Developer Studio, and JBoss IDE at EclipseCon. The demo ran through creating a Seam based application from nothing more than a database. It used Seam-Gen, a code/descriptor generation tool included with Seam and integrated into the new development platform. In very short order, I was able to reverse engineer EJB 3 Entity Pojos, and generate a basic CRUD UI to manage all those entities. Then with just a few tags, I was able to add Ajax support to the application using the included Ajax4JSF tag libraries, as well as add in rich controls from the included RichFaces libraries. Finally, I was able to integrate BPM and Rules into the application by drawing out a business process (or coding it in XML) and then binding code to the steps in the process. I simply needed to let Seam know about the process, and it was invoked automatically from the application.
I have never really been that fond of visual editors, but I like the way that the Exadel tooling combined visual previewing of JSF Facelets pages with code editing. It helps speed development of JSF based UIs up quite a bit, and doesn't get in the way. Also the integration of the Seam and Hibernate/EJB 3 tooling makes visualizing the application quite easy.