JBoss Tools Metawidget Support

This page is an attempt to collect together ideas and proposals for what Metawidget support may look like within JBoss Tools.

metawidget.xml

Metawidget can (optionally) be configured with an external XML file, typically named metawidget.xml. For more details see here.

XML Schemas

This XML format is similar to the Seam components.xml format, in that it uses XML namespaces to both identify Java packages and allow XML schema validation. The XML schemas for all Metawidget components are automatically generated at http://metawidget.org/xsd. For example http://metawidget.org/xsd/org.metawidget.jsp.tagext.html.layout-1.0.xsd.

JBoss Tools could help metawidget.xml construction by being aware of all XML schemas in http://metawidget.org/xsd.

ConfigReader

Metawidget processes metawidget.xml using a ConfigReader class. This is lightweight, and it may be possible to run it in addition to XML schema validation to detect such errors as, say, class or package name incorrectly specified.

ConfigReader also does some sanity checks of its own, such as checking whether certain classes implement .equals and .hashCode, and it may to nice to alert the user of these at development time rather than application startup time.

Annotations

Metawidget supports a lot of third-party annotations, but also supplies some of its own. These could be discovered and autocompleted by the UI. Details at http://metawidget.org/doc/api/index.html.

TLDs

Metawidget includes TLDs for all tags, detailed here http://metawidget.org/doc/taglib/index.html