Naked Objects

Naked Objects is a Java framework for automatically generating a user interface from a set of classes. I really like this idea.

The first four years of my career were spent developing custom applications that generally followed the pattern of "software that controls some custom hardware, has a GUI, and is persistent to a relational database". The GUI nearly always was a very simple reflection of the underlying object structure. In that context, something like this would be very useful. First it would allow delivery of a prototype very quickly, since the GUI code would be largely implicit. Second it would allow the customer to play around and see the software's potential for themselves. Third, in a released product, it could serve as a GUI-style scripting language that users could use if the "standard" GUI wasn't sufficient for some unanticipated task.

Except for the fact that I no longer use Java and no longer write GUIs, I would definitely start learning and using this framework. It seems to hold a lot of potential for simplifying development.