Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

26Magritte: Meta-data at Work

Many applications consist of a large number of input dialogs and reports that need to be built, displayed and validated manually. Often these dialogs remain static after the development phase and cannot be changed unless a new development effort occurs. For certain kinds of application domains such as small businesses, changing business plans, modifying workflows, etc., it usually boils down to minor modifications to domain objects and behavior, for example new fields have to be added, configured differently, rearranged or removed. Performing such tasks is tedious.

Magritte is a meta-data description framework. With Magritte you describe your domain objects and among other things you can get Seaside components and their associated validation for free. Moreover Magritte is self-described, enabling the automatic generation of meta-editors which can be adapted for building end-user customizations of application.

In this chapter we describe Magritte, its design and how to customize it. Now be warned, Magritte is a framework supporting meta-data description. As any framework, mastering it takes time. It is not a scaffolding engine, therefore Magritte may imply some extra complexity and you have to understand when you want to pay for such complexity.

Copyright © 19 March 2024 Stéphane Ducasse, Lukas Renggli, C. David Shaffer, Rick Zaccone
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

This book is published using Seaside, Magritte and the Pier book publishing engine.