Bootstrap Code Generation Framework Released

Development of the Bootstrap Framework started in December 2003 while I had a long wait at an airport. It was born out of frustration that getting applications started took too long and distracted from concentrating on the core business functionality. It also became a personal tool to integrate new technologies, such as Hibernate, to quickly create working applications to better understand how to use the new technologies. The core domain model of an application remains fairly consistent while infrastructure technologies - to persist state to a database, create the user interface, etc, change frequently.

While earlier versions of the framework generated applications using Struts and EJB2, its has evolved to integrate technologies such as the Spring Framework and Hibernate. This first published release uses Spring, Hibernate, and Flex as the front-end in response to a recent presentation I gave at a Flex Users Group and my recent learning to better understand Flex 2 and its integration with Java.

Publishing this first release was also dependent on migrating from Ant to Maven to improve the build of generated applications and management of third-party library dependencies. This was a much bigger task than I had expected.

I am releasing the code under the LGPL license. The intent is to ensure that any improvements to the generator and templates is made available back to the community, while generated applications may be used for commercial applications.

I welcome feedback.