“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Frequently Asked Questions

How is security handled?. Naked Objects provides full support both for user authentication and authorisation. The user's role(s) may determine which classes of domain objects they may access, which properties, and which actions within those objects. This information may be administered via a simple file, LDAP, or relational database.

Can I use Naked Objects to prototype an application that will be deployed on a different architecture?. Absolutely - in fact most people start to use Naked Objects initial for prototyping only and only later consider using it as a full deployment platform. The domain objects that you create for Naked Objects are Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) - they aren't tied to Naked Objects in any way. So if you want to develop a hand-crafted user interface to invoke the objects' functionality, you can.

To what type of applications is Naked Objects best (and worst!) suited?. The auto-created user interfaces give the user a great deal of flexibility and control, but the corollary is that it does take a short while to get to know that user interface. So Naked Objects is best suited to the kind of in-house application that people use intensively; it is not at all suited to applications intended to be used by people with no training (for example a public web-site). However, per the previous question, there is nothing to stop you from developing a Naked Objects application for internal users, then building a more conventional tightly-scripted interface to the same domain objects, for use by external parties.

Do I have to use Hibernate?. No, it is possible to write alternative object stores to work with Naked Objects. For example, the download includes a simple 'XML Object Store' that is useful for prototyping purposes.

Is Naked Objects available for .NET? Naked Objects 2.0 is available for .NET. We are currently working on an implementation of Naked Objects 3.0 for .NET, and expect to have beta versions available before the end of 2007.