will this eventually be part of betwixt?
No (for a couple of reasons).It's out-of-scope for jakarta commons but (more importantly) the ambitions are a little bigger than just a useful UI for Betwixt.
It emerged out of talks Dennis, Dan and I were having about crucial features for (next generation) mappers. It became clear that the most important missing features (those not currently under development somewhere) weren't really anything to do with the engine and would be best summed up as a expressive RAD tool for visualizing mappings.
The actual binding engine will be factored out. Betwixt is very convenient for prototyping (since it's a dynamic binder) but the plan is to offer initial support for JIBX and Betwixt as binding engines. The same basic mapping descriptions developed would be available for all supported binding engines. This would give good support for bean-centric mappings to JIBX and give Betwixt users a simple path to upgrade to a generative mapper when required. Anyone wanting to contribute support for other mappers would be welcomed but they may find they would need to work on improvements to their engine since the aim is highest (not lowest) common demoninator.
The medium term vision would be to support multiple import formats (dot Betwixt files, annotations and so on) and multiple engines. The really exciting stuff would be Dan's ideas about deep integration into an IDE but probably need to gain some momentum and developers by creating something more modest first.
Doesn't have a name or a home as yet. Will be ASL2.0. If anyone out there has an urge to help out then that'd motivate me to sort out host it publically somewhere...
Robert
