I dunno how long its been around, but I was looking into some OSX Tiger stuff and stumbled onto Core Data:
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/coredata.html.
In reading through it it sounds a lot like what is done with “Repository” in ATG. I don’t really like the ‘dynamic bean’ approach in either case…no strong typing and messy mappings to and from the actual data model (pojos). At least they both support mapping to pojos as well.
I like Core Data’s drag and drop interface builder feature. Just drag the component from the diagram to an interface being built and it will create a very simple (but functional) interface for it. ATG has a similar interface for each component…kind of a generic editor that provides a way to manipulate repository items’ attributes (data..rows in db) by providing appropriate gui inputs for the associated types.
