Metawidget integrates with: Java Android AngularJS Bootstrap FreeMarker JBoss Forge Google Web Toolkit Groovy Hibernate ICEfaces JQuery UI Java Server Faces Node.js OVal PrimeFaces RichFaces Scala Spring Struts Swing SWT Tomahawk Vaadin
Metawidget is proudly: Open Source (OSI) Friend of the JBoss Community Open Invention Network

News

Metawidget Ported to Angular 2 and React

9th February 2017

Metawidget development has slowed lately, thanks to two factors: the framework itself is very mature; and I've been consumed by my startup.

However, thanks to the Open Source community others have taken up the mantle. I look forward to integrating their work into the main branch in the future! For now, keep an eye on:

In addition, I'm still doing small changes and fixes as they come up.

Metawidget v4.2 Released!

15th December 2015

Metawidget v4.2 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Improved PrimeFaces support
  • HeadingTagLayoutDecorator supports starting level
  • DivLayoutDecorator supports styleClass
  • Improved AngularJS support
  • prepend/append InspectionResultProcessors/WidgetProcessors can now be done without an array (JavaScript Metawidget)
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v4.1 Released!

19th February 2015

Metawidget v4.1 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • JQuery Mobile layout improvements (suppressDivAroundLabel, suppressDivAroundWidget)
  • Improved support for JQuery Mobile overridden widgets
  • Top-level styleClass (JavaScript Metawidget)
  • Fix recursive save on Web Components
  • Bootstrap improvements (wrapInsideLabels, wrapWithExtraDiv)
  • Support table footers in HtmlWidgetBuilder (JavaScript Metawidget)
  • Windows Mobile Internet Explorer compatibility
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v4.0 Released!

2nd November 2014

Metawidget v4.0 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • HTML5 Web Components support
  • clearWidgets support (JavaScript version)
  • JsonSchemaTypeMappingProcessorConfig
  • Improved Node.js support
  • Boolean radio buttons (JavaScript version)
  • Minor refactoring
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v3.9 Released!

27th May 2014

Metawidget v3.9 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Bower support
  • Using nested Metawidgets when rendering collections
  • Support for editable collections
  • Support for xsi:nil
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v3.8 Released!

25th February 2014

Metawidget v3.8 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Re-licensed under LGPL/EPL and a commercial license
  • Bootstrap 3 support
  • AngularJS date support, ngShow/ngHide support, memory leak fix
  • Spring 3.2.6 support
  • HTML 5 color picker support
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget on CloudBees

1st January 2014

The awesome folks over at CloudBees have kindly donated a FOSS account for our nightly builds!

This means you can now download snapshot bundles of Metawidget. These are complete ZIPs containing all binaries, minified JavaScript libraries, API documentation, Reference Guide PDFs and pre-built examples. Of course, Maven snapshot JARs will still be available.

Metawidget v3.7 Released!

8th December 2013

Metawidget v3.7 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • JQuery Mobile support
  • JavaScript DefinitionListLayout
  • Angular 1.2 support
  • JavaScript support for collections of radio buttons
  • SwingMetawidget collections support
  • JacksonInspector
  • Android ReflectionBindingProcessor
  • JSP validation improvements
  • Spring inline error validation
  • CloudBees build
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v3.6 Released!

20th September 2013

Metawidget v3.6 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Nested Metawidgets inside tables (JavaScript version)
  • Support for HTML5 placeholder attributes
  • Node.js support for reloading widget values based on HTTP requests
  • Support for Bootstrap inputAppend
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v3.5 Released!

27th July 2013

Metawidget v3.5 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget. In. Spaaace.

20th June 2013

This white paper presents a case study of using Metawidget to power GALILEO, a Global Navigation Satellite System built by the European Union and European Space Agency.

The team used Metawidget's pluggable inspection architecture to enable them to reuse the detailed XML Schemas set up for transmission to/from the satellites, and generate a UI without having to respecify anything. They also used Metawidget's pluggable widget processors to incorporate third-party validation libraries.

Download the case study here.

Metawidget v3.4 Released!

7th June 2013

Metawidget v3.4 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v3.3 Released!

15th April 2013

Metawidget v3.3 is now available!

This release was focused on:

This release contains breaking changes. We apologise for the disruption and provide this Metawidget 3.2 to 3.3 Migration Guide.

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget presented at Sydney AngularJS User Group

28th March 2013

Metawidget has been presented at the AngularJS User Group at Google Headquarters, Sydney. Slides and source code from the presentation are available to download.

Metawidget v3.2 Released!

6th March 2013

Metawidget v3.2 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v3.1 Released!

10th February 2013

Metawidget v3.1 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Improvements to pure JavaScript, JQuery UI and Angular JS Metawidgets
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v3.0 Released!

31st January 2013

Metawidget v3.0 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget Wins PhD Thesis Of The Year

30th January 2013

The PhD thesis Derivation of a General Purpose Architecture for Automatic User Interface Generation details the research that underpins Metawidget. It has won the Distinguished Australasian Doctoral Dissertation Award (formerly known as the Best PhD Thesis Award).

The award is presented annually to the best PhD thesis in Australasia.

Full details can be found here.

Metawidget meets JQuery UI and AngularJS

2nd January 2013

The next release of Metawidget will be later than usual. Our apologies.

We are busy porting Metawidget to a whole new platform. Version 3.0 will support fully client-side Web Metawidgets, with initial support for either pure JavaScript, JQuery UI and/or AngularJS. Each JavaScript implementation will support the same five stage pipeline as the existing Metawidgets.

Development builds are already available, and there is an example application to download. More details can be found on this blog entry.

Metawidget Nominated For PhD Thesis Of The Year

1st December 2012

The PhD thesis Derivation of a General Purpose Architecture for Automatic User Interface Generation details the research that underpins Metawidget. It has been nominated for the most Distinguished Australasian Doctoral Dissertation Award (formerly known as the Best PhD Thesis Award).

The award is presented annually to the best PhD thesis in Australasia. Each University may select only one candidate to be put forward. The winner will be announced in January 2013. Previous winners can be found here.

Metawidget v2.5 Released!

19th October 2012

Metawidget v2.5 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Improved JSF support: better AJAX; XHTML compliance
  • Improved support for RichFaces 4: CollapsiblePanel; UIAutocomplete
  • Move Metawidget to Maven Central
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v2.4 Released!

12th August 2012

Metawidget v2.4 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v2.3 Released!

10th July 2012

Metawidget v2.3 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Final release of Spring Metawidget for JBoss Forge
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget and Palantir

15th June 2012

Metawidget is being used in the latest release of Palantir's Gotham (3.9). Gotham is Palantir's flagship product, allowing users to work with massive amounts of data — of all types and from disparate systems — in a single place. Analysts can conduct high-speed searches through the entire body of their data to pull out significant intelligence.

Palantir are using Metawidget to power Gotham's Groovy-based Webflow forms, allowing users to dynamically configure Webflow ontologies to suit their needs.

Metawidget v2.2 Released!

14th May 2012

Metawidget v2.2 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Special thanks to Loghman Barari for his help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v2.1 Released!

19th March 2012

Metawidget v2.1 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Static HTML 5 Metawidget (ready for JBoss AeroGear)
  • Improvements to static Metawidgets for JSP, Spring and JSF
  • Swing GridBagLayout now supports 0 columns
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Special thanks to Ryan Bradley for his help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget and JBoss Forge

29th February 2012

After years of hard work, JBoss Forge 1.0.0.Final has been released! Forge is a core framework and next-generation shell for rapid-application development in a standards-based environment. Forge uses Metawidget internally for static generation of its UI scaffolding.

For full details visit the JBoss Forge website.

Metawidget and JBoss AeroGear

24th February 2012

Metawidget has been prototyped into JBoss AeroGear. This allows JBoss Forge to generate UI scaffolds for mobile applications, based on POH5 and JQuery.

Full details, and a working sample, can be downloaded here.

Metawidget v2.0 Released!

1st February 2012

Metawidget v2.0 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Drop support for JDK 1.4 (was causing a number of issues with frameworks that scan the classpath)
  • Implement long-standing refactorings (taking the opportunity now that we've broken binary compatibility)
  • Static Metawidget improvements (ready for JBoss Forge)
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v1.35 Released!

10th January 2012

Metawidget v1.35 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • First version of StaticMetawidget
  • Support JPA @Temporal
  • Output HTML <label> tags around labels
  • Refactor StrutsWidgetBuilder/SpringWidgetBuilder into WidgetProcessors
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget and JBoss Forge

2nd November 2011

The next release of Metawidget will be a couple months later than usual. Our apologies.

We are busy helping the JBoss team integrate Metawidget into their upcoming final release of JBoss Forge.

Metawidget @ JavaOne 2011

10th October 2011

We had a great time presenting Metawidget at JavaOne 2011. We had a good turn out (about sixty people) with lots of good questions at the end. My thanks to all who attended, and to my co-speaker Dan Allen.

The full talk will be available on Parleys. A JBoss booth video is also available.

Metawidget v1.30 Released!

30th August 2011

Metawidget v1.30 is now available!

This release was focused on:

This release contains breaking changes. We apologise for the disruption and provide this Metawidget 1.25 to 1.30 Migration Guide.

Special thanks to George Gastaldi for his help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Case Study: Telefónica Health Portal

24th July 2011

This white paper presents a case study of using Metawidget to provide automatic UI generation for the Telefónica Health Portal system. The Health Portal is a Web-based application designed around a Service Oriented Architecture and built using Google Web Toolkit. It serves the Spanish National Health System and is deployed to some 3,000 hospitals and health clinics across Spain. The integration of Metawidget allowed Telefónica to reduce development and ongoing maintenance costs. It further allowed the Health Portal to offer a level of flexibility and functionality not possible in previous products.

Download the case study here.

Metawidget v1.25 Released!

14th July 2011

Metawidget v1.25 is now available!

This release was focused on:

This release contains breaking changes. We apologise for the disruption and provide this Metawidget 1.20 to 1.25 Migration Guide.

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget @ JavaOne 2011

12th July 2011

Metawidget has been accepted for a technical session at JavaOne 2011 (October 2nd-6th, San Francisco):

DRY UIs: Let the metadata do the work

How many times have you sat in a dark office after hours hand editing forms, page after page? Software teams spend a lot of time developing the UI. To speed up the process, developers resort to drag-and-drop widget solutions or model-based static generation tools. These approaches only change the appearance of the problem.

This talk presents Metawidget as a solution to keep your UIs DRY. Metawidget is a smart UI processor that populates itself, either statically or at runtime, with UI components that match properties of your model. Rather than introduce new technologies, it reads existing metadata (e.g. JavaBeans, annotations, XML) to create native UI widgets (e.g. JSF, Android, Swing).

Stop hand-coding your forms! Come learn how to break out of the rut!

Metawidget v1.20 Released!

12th May 2011

Metawidget v1.20 is now available!

This release was focused on:

  • Improved examples to work better with Tomcat 7
  • Improved module POMs to work better with m2eclipse
  • Allow JavaBeanPropertyStyle to disable caching
  • Allow location of metawidget.xml to be configured in web.xml
  • Bug fixes, documentation and unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v1.15 Released!

30th April 2011

Metawidget v1.15 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Special thanks to Renato Garcia and Lincoln Baxter III for their help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget included in Seam Forge

8th March 2011

JBoss have just released Alpha 3 of Seam Forge, their framework for rapid-application development. Seam Forge is part of Seam 3.0.0.CR2 and utilizes Metawidget for its UI scaffolding support.

Read more about Seam Forge here.

Metawidget v1.10 Released!

10th February 2011

Metawidget v1.10 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Special thanks to Ronald van Kuijk and Leon E for their help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v1.05 Released!

15th December 2010

Metawidget v1.05 is now available!

This release was focused on:

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v1.0 Released!

30th September 2010

Metawidget v1.0 is now available! Representing the culmination of two and a half years of careful incremental releases, we're proud to announce this final 1.0 release of the industry's most practical User Interface generator.

The past 30 months have been an exciting ride. We've paid close attention to your feedback, conducted detailed interviews and case studies, and assisted over a dozen production deployments. We've seen Metawidget deployed at energy companies, by governments, in pharmaceutical labs, for ERP, for light and sound engineering, for telecommunications, and more.

We've worked closely with key industry players and developed strong ties with the academic community - publishing conference papers and journal articles, and fostering relationships with other research teams.

We'd like to thank everyone for their support in getting us this far. And now that we're 1.0, there's never been a better time to dive in and see what Metawidget can do for you! It's mature, it's Open Source, and it's ready to save you from all that error-prone, laborious, boilerplate UI code!

This release was focused on:

  • Improved JSF support (binding attribute)
  • Refactored HiddenFieldProcessor for JSP, Struts and Spring
  • Improved JPA support (can now hide transient fields)
  • Refactoring, bug fixes, unit tests; and
  • Lots of documentation!

Special thanks to Gérard Collin and Ian Darwin for their help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

UML Wallchart Available

20th September 2010

The documentation section now includes a UML wallchart showing which technologies Metawidget can mix and match, and what configuration options are available.

Many thanks to Steffan Luypaert for all his hard work creating this great poster! Download it here.

Metawidget v0.99 Released!

26th July 2010

Metawidget v0.99 is now available. This release is focused on tightening the codebase ready for our v1.0 release!

Special thanks to Bernhard Huber and Stuart Douglas for their help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget featured at JBoss World 2010

2nd June 2010

JBoss have announced that Metawidget will be showcased at a featured campground session at this year's JBoss World.

Hope to see you there!

Metawidget v0.95 Released!

1st May 2010

Metawidget v0.95 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

Special thanks to Stefan Ackermann for his contributions to this release, and to Nebojsa Cvijovic for his help testing!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.9 Released!

6th January 2010

Metawidget v0.9 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

This release contains breaking changes. We apologise for the disruption and provide this Metawidget 0.85 to 0.9 Migration Guide.

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.85 Released!

20th October 2009

Metawidget v0.85 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

This release contains breaking changes. We apologise for the disruption and provide this Metawidget 0.8 to 0.85 Migration Guide.

Special thanks to Girolamo Violante and Illya Yalovyy for their help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget featured with ICEfaces

1st October 2009

Metawidget is now featured on the ICEfaces Projects page, showcasing the integration between Metawidget and the ICEfaces AJAX framework.

Thanks to Ken Fyten, Robert Lepack and Ted Goddard for making this happen.

Metawidget v0.8 Released!

11th August 2009

Metawidget v0.8 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

Special thanks to Ted Goddard for his help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget included with JBoss Seam

8th June 2009

Metawidget v0.75 is now included with the JBoss Seam 2.1.2 distribution, along with updated samples for the JBoss Seam Hotel Booking, Groovy Hotel Booking and DVD Store applications. You can read more about the integration between Metawidget and Seam here.

Special thanks to Dan Allen for his help with this process.

Metawidget v0.75 Released!

11th May 2009

Metawidget v0.75 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

  • Pluggable widget libraries
  • SwingX support
  • DisplayTag support
  • More documentation
  • Bug fixes; and
  • More unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.7 Released!

12th February 2009

Metawidget v0.7 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

  • Pluggable action bindings for GWT and Swing
  • Pluggable Swing validation (including JGoodies Validator)
  • MigLayout support
  • Scala support
  • OSGi support
  • Upgraded support for Android (1.0 R2) and Seam (2.1.1.GA)
  • Fluent API for configuring Inspectors programmatically

Special thanks to Stefan Ackermann, Ivaylo Kovatchev and Renato Garcia for their help with this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.65 Released!

4th December 2008

Metawidget v0.65 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

  • Commons Validator support
  • Live Demo (see this page)
  • Upgraded support for BeanUtils (1.8), Groovy (1.6 Beta 2), GWT (1.5.3) and Seam (2.1.0.SP1)
  • Bug fixes; and
  • More unit tests

Special thanks to Gerardo Diazcorujo and Ryan Cornia for their help testing this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.6 Released!

30 September 2008

Metawidget v0.6 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

Special thanks to Rintcius Blok for his contributions to this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.55 Released!

10 July 2008

Metawidget v0.55 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

Special thanks to Tom Bee for all his help testing this release!

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.5 Released!

16 June 2008

Metawidget v0.5 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.43 Released!

13 April 2008

Metawidget v0.43 is now available. This release includes the following enhancements:

  • Read-only mode for displaying (rather than editing) domain objects
  • Facelets support
  • Mixin to ease development of custom Metawidgets

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.4 Released!

26 February 2008

Metawidget v0.4 is now available. This release concentrates on polishing, based on feedback from the previous release:

  • support for suppressing labels
  • support for Jetty
  • bug fixes; and
  • more unit tests

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.3 Released!

13 February 2008

Metawidget v0.3 is now available. This release concentrates on polishing, based on feedback from the previous release:

  • clearer documentation (ie. save the technical details until later)
  • more thorough unit tests; and
  • lower system requirements (ie. better support for J2SE 1.4)

Your continued feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget v0.2 Released!

5th February 2008

Metawidget v0.2 is now available. This release includes code, documentation, examples and tests, and is intended as a preview to convey the 'concept' of Metawidget. Features include:

  • Pluggable inspectors and layouts
  • Android support
  • Java Server Faces support
  • Java Server Pages support
  • Spring support
  • Struts support
  • Swing support

Special thanks to Michael Studman for all his help testing this release!

Your feedback is invaluable to us. Please download it and let us know what you think.

Metawidget Begins

19th September 2007

Richard Kennard has given a talk at the Sydney Java User Group entitled 'Self-generating JSF components: exploring ways to use reflection, annotations and generics to enable self-generating (and self-updating) JSF components'. He looked at problems concerning the current state of User Inteface development, and outlined new tools to overcome them.