Apache Causeway™ enables domain-driven application development by dynamically generating a UI and API for your Spring Boot™ apps. That means:
- Productivity - your app is mostly business logic, with costly UI code eliminated.
- Discovery - you can work hand-in-hand with your business domain experts, to understand the problem space and to explore and then select a solution within the solution space.
- Ease of Use - your business users will find the app easy to learn, with the business concepts front and center
- Simple Integration - you can integrate easily with other systems using the dynamically provided GraphQL and RESTful APIs, or by the automatically published domain events for async comms.
- Clean Architecture - you will find it easy to maintain a clear separation of concerns within your app's internal architecture
And because Apache Causeway™ is open source, running on top of Spring Boot™, you won't be locked into a vendor nor even the framework; the clean separation of concerns means you could even lift-n-shift the domain logic of your app to run elsewhere if need be.
Quotes
We gathered together some quotes from current users of the framework. You can find out who said what here.
I'm super happy with Apache Causeway! It allows us to move forward at an amazing speed.
Martin Hesse
Apache Causeway' philosophy is awesome - it drives you to focus on the domain model and encourages you to practice Behavior Driven Development.
In addition, it brings the team together, sets the common platform and provides the right set of tools (Wicket Viewer OOUI, REST APIs, Swagger UI, Cucumber Framework) to work collaboratively which is simply great for the software development.
It's a fabulously fantastic framework!
A big thank you to the Apache Causeway team.
Mansingh Shitole
Senior Developer, PRIME Research, Germany - Frankfurt / Mainz
Apache Causeway enabled us to concentrate on modelling the domain and getting the UI and REST Interface with nearly no effort so we could build a fast and reliable application. Now we've started using it for the second project and I'm still very impressed by the framework and the community behind it.
Timothy Simecsek
NTT DATA Osterreich GmbH
We'd been looking for a RAD-tool for building our app; after trying different tools, Apache Causeway gave us the most confidence for getting the job done. It's really remarkable how easy it is to use, while contributors and users on the Causeway' active mailing list are ready to help on more advanced topics.
Erik de Hair
pocos.nl
A fantastic framework! With Apache Causeway we can prototype a deployable application in minutes rather than days.
Jeremy Branham
With its automatic UI and REST web services generation, Apache Causeway kept our developers amazed and happy. Having had strenuous experiences with architecture and infrastructure concerns differing from project to project, it's like having back the fun in software development
Willie Loyd Tandingan
Apache Causeway' focus on the business domain improves communication between our end-users, architects and developers. Having a better application in a fraction of the time and cost is something we highly appreciate.
Cesar Lugo
The Apache Causeway team is very supportive. They even added new functionality for Summernote when I needed a WYSIWYG editor in my prototype project.
Marianne Hagaseth
What interests me most about Apache Causeway is its goal of making both developers and users co-owners of their domain models. Apache Causeway will be of interest to businesses who see their custom software as a strategic investment. It's not trying to be all things to all people, but it has depth and also, I predict, a bright future.
Steve Cameron
As students most of us prefer sticking with business logic than spending much time with UX enhancements. Apache Causeway provides a great platform to create a perfectly working prototypes with loads of inbuilt UX concerns and customizations without worrying a single bit on the GUI perspective.
And I must say this: "Great Support from the development team"
Vishma Dias
University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
Apache Causeway has allowed us to be focused on the Domain instead of infrastructure issues. The extensive metamodel let us further automate and enhance our custom viewer and integrate with external frameworks.
Nacho Canovas
Apache Causeway provided us with a great starting point for our app; we simply took the todoapp archetype and used it as a template to help set up our integration tests and BDD specs. We were productive almost immediately
Vladimir Nisevic
A1 Telekom Austria
Apache Causeway enabled us to focus on the problem domain and data quality and - because the UI was generated for us by the framework - not get distracted by UI concerns. Identified security issues were quickly addressed by the Apache Causeway committers.
Architect
We use Apache Causeway because of its simple and fast user interface generation.
Andreas Lechner
Apache Causeway is an easy to learn, efficient and productive RAD platform.
Further I can say it is evolving to be "the best RAD platform" without any exaggerations.
The help from the community is simply wonderful.
Theekshana Dilshan
Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
Apache Causeway is one of the best tools for hackathons. Given a 2 day hackathon challenge I have the perfect framework to create my prototype helping me to focus on business logic.
Sunand Padmanabhan
From a Sprint retrospective, the criticism of one lead developer sounded more like praise:
"The problem is that if we show this to the customer they will think that all the work is done."
provided by Ged Byrne
How it works
UI & APIs “for free”
Apache Causeway™ dynamically builds a generic user interface for end-users, and also a complete GraphQL API and a rich hypermedia RESTful API, with both behaviour and structure inferred from the underlying domain objects. This makes for extremely rapid prototyping and a short feedback cycle, perfect for agile development. The UI is themed using Bootstrap.
Domain-Driven
The core of an Apache Causeway™ application are the domain objects, either persisted entities or view models. Business rules can be associated directly with domain objects, or can be factored out into separate services. Apache Causeway performs dependency injection everywhere to ensure that the application remains decoupled and testable.
Add-ons
Apache Causeway™ includes a large number of add-on modules for security, auditing, command profiling, mail merge and other cross-cutting concerns. It also has a number of UI extensions for maps, calendars etc. All are open source and designed for out-of-the-box use or for you to modify as required.
Standing on the shoulders of giants
Apache Causeway™ is built on top of industry leading open source products, all licensed with the business-friendly licenses of either Apache™ Software License v2.0 or MIT.
Spring Boot™ is the de facto way to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring™-based applications.
Apache Wicket™ is an open source Java™ component oriented web application framework that powers thousands of web applications and websites.
Bootstrap™ is a powerful, extensible, and feature-packed frontend toolkit.
GraphQL Java is the Java™ implementation of the GraphQL specification.
RESTEasy™ is an implementation of the Jakarta™ RESTful Web Services specification for building RESTful Web Services and RESTful Java applications.
ByteBuddy™ is a code generation and manipulation library for creating and modifying Java™ classes during the runtime of a Java™ application.
EclipseLink™ is the reference implementation for JPA and a comprehensive open-source Java™ persistence solution addressing relational, XML, and database web services.
DataNucleus™ is the reference implementation for JDO, provides persistence and retrieval of data to a range of datastores using a range of APIs, with a range of query languages.
Project Lombok™ is a library that automatically plugs into your editor and build tools, spicing up your Java™.
Quick Start
Prereqs: v3.x: Java 17 and Maven 3.6+; v2.x: Java 11
We recommend you try out using Linux, MacOS or WSL2
(to avoid exceeding Windows' limits due to classpath length).
Try out ...
Try out the framework with the minimal helloworld starter app.
Run it locally using:
docker run -p 8080:8080 apache/causeway-app-helloworld:latest
Build from source (JPA or JDO) using:
APP=causeway-app-helloworld BRANCH=v3-jpa # or: v3-jdo ; v2-jpa ; v2-jdo curl https://codeload.github.com/apache/$APP/zip/$BRANCH | jar xv cd $APP-$BRANCH mvn clean install -Dskip.staging -Dskip.nightly mvn spring-boot:run
Copy text for helloworld (jpa)
Develop your own ...
Develop your own app with the structured simpleapp starter app.
Run it locally using:
docker run -p 8080:8080 apache/causeway-app-simpleapp:latest
Build from source (JPA or JDO) using:
APP=causeway-app-simpleapp BRANCH=v3-jpa # or: v3-jdo ; v2-jpa ; v2-jdo curl https://codeload.github.com/apache/$APP/zip/$BRANCH | jar xv cd $APP-$BRANCH mvn clean install -Dskip.staging -Dskip.nightly mvn -pl webapp spring-boot:run
Copy text for simpleapp (jpa)
Learn and Explore...
You can also explore the Apache Causeway™ programming model through the reference app, which illustrates many of the framework's annotations and programming conventions.
docker run -p 8080:8080 apache/causeway-app-demo-jpa:latest # or: ...-jdo:latest
NOTE: The online apps all scale to zero when not in use, so please allow up to a minute for it to restart if necessary.
Support
We provide support using either our Slack channel, or through mailing lists for support, use the links below to join. Most users prefer to use Slack, but we always make formal announcements on the users list; you can also browse the mailing list archives. If you find a problem, please raise a ticket on our JIRA, or ask a question on StackOverflow.