WebDSL and the missing abstractions

“drinking from the firehose” must be on everyone's buzzword bingo all-time greats list. Nevertheless, it's a very apt description of how I felt in Eelco Visser's talk on WebDSL during the code generation 2008 conference.

The core subject matter has been occupying my thoughts in the last few months; there are myriad lightweight web frameworks around now, all of which offer easy definition of the core domain objects and most of which will generate a standard CRUD GUI. All good stuff. But move beyond the auto-generated GUI into something custom and you're on your own. It's down to hacking some form of web template language (JSP/RHTML/Django templates/...) and patching up the link to the domain model through controllers.

I'd been thinking there must be a better, higher level set of abstractions for describing the UI – which could in turn be mapped onto the underlying technology. WebDSL addresses exactly that problem. At least I think it does. There was so much good stuff in Eelco's talk that I couldn't take it all in. I'll need to dig deeper – but right now it looks promising.