EDGE EMEA 2007 – CoolProfs’ WebService Connector
One of the issues with Gen all along has been the quality of user interface that can be generated by the toolset – lately, this issue has been overshadowed (in my book) by the fact that we can’t consume web services from the tool.
CoolProfs has the answer to both problems (as demonstrated at the conference).
Their StyleAdapter allows (by modifying the runtimes) styles to be applied to Gen-generated artifacts – buttons, columns etc etc. This demonstration was highly amusing, but also highly informative. Styles can be applied for many reasons, not least of which to make the interface “nice” but also for corporate reasons. The important thing to realise is that no changes in the model are required to achieve this. It’s implemented as a Gen plugin, and when styles change, only the configuration files need to change – NOT the model or any code.
The other thrust of the demonstration, however was the WebServiceConnector (shown here as an interactive tutorial). The product (implemented as a plugin) generates EABs for consumption of Web Services – total Java code generation. It will also generate a test harness for the new service to test it.
The session was highly interactive and shows CoolProfs professionalism and vast experience in making Gen do more than it was supposed to do!
