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GeDA was inspired by developer's lazyness (as always). The rationale for its existance was overhead of creating DTO Assemblers in an n-tier application to pass information within domain object to UI through DTO's (Data Transfer Objects). The basic principle of the above application design is to extract the necessary information from the domain objects in the form of DTO's.

In reality this involves a tidious get/set method calls that look very much the same for most of the objects. GeDA uses Java5's annotations in order to map DTO's onto paths of the Domain object properties (the reflection method).

Thus the annotated DTO's can be examined by a Generic DTO Assembler that will create specific instance of the assembler for the DTO is respect to a Domain object. The assembler is basically a placeholder for so called "data pipes" that allow transferring data from/to domain object's field. But do not take my word for it - try it out yourself.