Comment by ori_b
13 years ago
For a small number of tables?
Just bite the bullet and render them by hand. It'll take less time than writing the abstract whatever-driven autogenerated UI framework, making it lay things out nicely, handle all the corner cases and auto-wiring of stuff which might not be needed in all cases, and tweaking the generated code to look good for all the data.
You know, this is where conciseness comes in handy. Another suspicion that I have (in addition to the one I've voiced elsewhere here) is that complex, inflexible languages almost force people to write stuff "by hand". What exactly is the reason for a simple, small generative layer to be so complex that it can't beat hand-written stuff for two dozen tables? I'd understand if you were talking about Java and Cobol, for example, but I'd think that such languages as Ruby, Smalltalk, and Lisp will have the threshold for "now it's worth it to be generic" quite a bit lower. I'm not sure where exactly, but certainly lower.