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