Understanding how WEF builds UI

We know you are eager to start building the user interface for your portlet. But before we demonstrate how to do so through our examples, we need to cover a few important concepts.

We have already mentioned that WEF offers tremendous productivity gains when building the user interface for your portlets. Let's understand how this is accomplished.

Data-driven development approach

The fastest way to build UI pages and even an entire application is by taking advantage of the data-driven approach implemented by WEF. This approach can be noticed not only in the Service Consumer layer, but also in the Service Provider layer. In the Service Provider layer, WEF inspects backend objects to build numerous artifacts. In this process, the main artifacts created by WEF are the XML schemas.

In the UI layer, WEF uses these XML schemas and other data definition elements to build a representation of the UI it needs to create. This representation includes information about a...