VMF-Tutorials

This collection of tutorials gives an introduction to VMF and its use in regular Java projects.

Contents

• Introduction
• Defining your first model
• Using the Change Notification API
• Containment References
• Cross References
• Undo/Redo API
• Using the Builder API
• Object Graph Traversal and Custom Property Order
• Immutable Objects & ReadOnly API
• Custom Behavior & Delegation
• Custom Default Values for Properties
• Equals & HashCode
• Annotations
• Cloning (Deep Copy & Shallow Copy)
• The Reflection API
• Custom Model Documentation
• External Types
• Maven Plugin

Introduction

VMF is a lightweight modeling framework for the Java platform. It generates/supports:

• getters and setters
• default values
• containment
• cross refrences
• builder API
• equals() and hashCode()
• deep and shallow cloning
• change notification
• undo/redo
• object graph traversal API via iterators and streams
• immutable types and read-only wrappers
• delegation
• annotations
• reflection
• ...

A VMF model consists of annotated Java interfaces. We could call this "wannabe" code. We just specify the interface and its properties and get a rich implementation that implements the property setters and getters, builders and much more. Even for a simple model VMF generated a lot of useful API:

VMF integrates well into manual Java implementations. It comes with a Gradle plugin which means that using VMF is very simple. The tutorials will walk you through all major aspects of VMF.

Continue with the FIRST TUTORIAL.