First impressions of WWB

[Tuukka Mustonen]

Hi all,

I have been fiddling around with WWB and my first impressions:

1) I am surprised of the "completeness" of the product. It does what it promises to do. Didn't bump up into any bugs (yet!). Really deserves its' 1.x label.
2) Documentation is at high level for such a small project. The documentation is clear and thorough enough. Having property reference in the end is a nice thing to have. Having the documentation walk side by side with examples really rocks.
3) I really like the clean code and inline documentation. I didn't explore WWB too much, but when I did it was evident right away what part did what.
4) Flexibility, that WWB allows is at good level. The forms can be placed anywhere, their appearance can be modified (mostly through CSS as WWB creates lots of CSS class indicators) and their structure is tied to how you define them, not strictly to your beans' structure. Also, you can use WWB with any beans so it's not tied to some (persistency) technology. Having registries and setting custom fields for field types is a nice approach as well.

Overall, I definitely give thumbs up. Sure, sometimes WWB abstractions will become too restrictive and one has to fallback on good old handcrafting, but I think we all like the productivity boost it gives to those dull old CRUD screens.

I must admit that I was a bit scared when I noticed that there hasn't been any big updates lately. However, a solid and complete product doesn't necessarily need ones.

I think it's good time for the authors to start smoking their cigars. Good work! :)

Regards,
Tuukka