Yasuyuki, short Yasu, is Supportability Engineer at Liferay. He's working out of Japan for ~8 years now, and in that time has started an interesting side project that you might be interested in. Well - I was interested, so I asked him for some time and we talked about it: Damascus.

Here are some of the topics that we talked about:

• Yasu is working on Damascus, an extension of ServiceBuilder that helps you set up a new project extremely quickly. And it's documented.

• Its purpose: Quick generation of master data applications, that you can edit further to enrich as a proper application

• Starting from a json file, you'll generate persistence and UI for multiple Liferay Portal versions

• A similar (but discontinued) project was mentioned on Radio Liferay in episodes 30 and 32: XmlPortletFactory.

• What to do to make Damascus an officially maintained project

• REST additions in Damascus

• Updates of the tool to 7.3, and of custom code generated with Damascus (should be easy)

• Freemarker to Java ratio - what it's like to write code that generates code.

• Best Practices and where they're worked around in the generator

• The heritage of the name Damascus, and how it relates to Liferay's "blade" tool

• Bonus Tool: DummyFactory

Follow @yasuflatland-lf on github, @RadioLiferay and @olafk (me) on twitter.

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(*) At the time of publishing this episode, you actually won't find everything - the Radio Liferay homepage didn't yet move to the community pages, so it isn't updated with newer episodes. Sorry - we're working on it, but as the podcast is a spare time project, working on the infrastructure is slower than on other projects... But the feed works already - just subscribe...

(Illustration, CC by-sa 2.0 jasleen_kaur)