I think I finally realized on Monday night that my application generator was going well. I am doing a pretty big rewrite of the generator to fix a couple of design decisions I don't love and was trying to get a project done on the new code base. I had just completely changed my metadata model, so I had broken pretty much every line of code and with time running out I realized that I was never going to get the project done before my all day class on Tuesday. I took my metadata description for the project, entered it into the previous version of my framework and within 15 minutes I had a rich admin system with roles and authentication up and working for a bunch of custom objects.

I feel like I've solved the core problem of being able to generate rich applications using metadata (actually, I interpret the metadata using a framework rather than generating code right now, but the outcome is pretty much the same), but I don't feel like my system is flexible enough to handle big changes in the structure of my metadata or my approach to consuming it. The application knows much more than I'd like it to about how my meta model is structured and that's something I really want to fix . . .

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