DeKlarit 2.0

While I'm in Bellevue attending to a ND Microsoft event, our team released DeKlarit 2.0.

We put a lot of work in this release, and we are proud of it, but of course we are dreaming with the features 3.0 will have.

The main features 2.0 are support for Oracle, VB.NET code generation and VS.NET 2003 integration. As the code generator is written in Prolog, the VB.NET thing was not just using another serializer for a CodeDom ;), but as it is written in Prolog, it was quite easy to do too.

Some interesting things happened in the way from 1.x to 2.x. One was the requirement to generate VB.NET. When we started the DeKlarit project, about 2 years ago, we thought that the language wars will be over with .NET, but some people still wanted VB.NET code instead of C# code, even if they were not going to modify the code DeKlarit generates. We were wrong, and after some "call me when it supports VB.NET's we decided to go for it.

DeKlarit is a tool that generates the Data Access Layer and Business Logic Layers of an application, but it takes as input 'user-views' of the business entities, it generates DataSets with those user views, and it adds additional metadata to the DataSets. Using that metadata, in version 1.0 we built some add-ins that read it and generated ASP.NET apps, Windows Forms apps, and a Web Service layer.

So, the other requirement was to improve those add-ins.  I'm really not a user-interface guy, and I think our main competitive advantage is not there, but we ended up doing it, so we have a much better ASP.NET generator.

The ASP.NET generator saves a lot of work, but the UI-paradigm it follows is not revolutionary, it's a pretty common approach to web applications. 

I'm looking for different/revolutionary ways to design a UI for database-centric web applications, not for an Amazon-like e-commerce site but for ERP-like applications. If you have any ideas, links, etc, they will be welcome!