The latest version of OpenXava, a Java framework for rapid development of enterprise applications, supports all strategies of JPA inheritance mapping and the Automated Business Logic (ABL) library. OpenXava version 4.5 was released last month.
JPA inheritance mapping:
Prior to the new version, only single table per class hierarchy mapping strategy was supported where the classes hierarchy is stored in the same table. With OpenXava 4.5, the developers now can also use joined and table per class mapping strategies. OpenXava will generate a correct user interface for the classes defined with the inheritance mapping.
Data for list and collections:
Until now OpenXava has used JDBC API to get the data for list and collection objects. There is a new JPATabProvider class to read the data from a list object; this is the one used by default. It allows to support all the inheritance JPA types, and can potentially be used with other persistence frameworks like DataNucleus to access the emerging non-relational databases.
Automated Business Logic:
Automated Business Logic (ABL) allows the developers to define business logic declaratively using annotations. This annotation based business logic approach helps to replace several lines of code with few annotations giving the advantage of automated re-use and simplified maintenance. The Automated Business Logic team has worked on integrating their library in OpenXava and the new version of OpenXava framework comes bundled with ABL runtime library.
Val Huber wrote about the Domain Driven Automation concept supported by ABL framework.
New layout architecture:
The latest release also supports a new UI rendering engine that generates complex user interfaces for OpenXava applications. This feature is still in beta so it's disabled by default, but the users can activate it using the xava.properties file.
For more information on how to use OpenXava framework, check out the Quick Start Guide documentation on their website.