Over the last couple of years there has been a lot of talk about Ruby on Rails and Grails and how easy it is to use them to quickly build an application. How would you like to be able to have all of that speed of development, but have it in a technology that you already know? If you are familiar with Struts or JSF, you can use Rev to quickly build an application for you. 

Rev is a code generation tool developed by Vgo Software, and it gives you the power to do that. All you need is a database, a JDBC driver (most of the common ones are provided with Rev out of the box), a JDK of version 1.5 or better and Rev. Using Rev you’ll be able to generate a completely functional CRUD application based on the tables that you select. The output can be in a variety of different flavors: JSF, Struts, JSF with AJAX, JDBC, EJB, Hibernate, etc. Rev also generates ANT build scripts for a variety of popular application servers so you can build and deploy your application directly from the tool. 

What good is a CRUD application? It all depends on what type of application you are building. For adding testing data or building some Administration screens for a system, the Rev output may be all you need. If you are building a more complicated system, then maybe the persistence layer is all you need and you can rework most of the UI layer. All of the source code is available for you to modify as you see fit, so whether it is the final application itself or the basis for something bigger you will always have something to start with.

One of the unique features of Rev is the ability to customize the generation. Not only can you easily customize the stylesheet from within Rev, but if you want to go deeper you can customize the templates that Rev uses to generate virtually whatever you’d like. From modifying the JSP pages that get generated to creating a whole new set of templates for a completely different language, you can do it all! In fact, included with Rev is a set of templates for generating a PHP-based application. 

You can download your free trial of Rev at the Vgo Software site. Also, be sure to sign up for the webinar I will be presenting on June 30th at 11:00 a.m. EST. During that webinar I will demonstrate how to use Rev and talk about the various output options.