Web application with RAD tool inside for dynamic JSP building

Question

I would realize a J2EE Web application based on JSP,Struts and eventually Spring for transaction management and iBatis for data access in my opinion very complex.
The application presents search, list and detail pages, and the information visibility depends on the user.
Each edit page could be based on a single page or many tabs, and a tab could contain entity's information or information associated to the entity subject of the page, displayed as list. The informations in editing phase will be controlled by javascript rules.
A web application administrator will set the information's grants (hidden, readonly, read and write) for each entity managed inside the application.
Now there is the complication: each page (search, list, detail) must be built by the web application administrator with a configurator/builder directy inside the same web application on the server!
For example, for a detail page:
1) each tab must be defined and named: so I can't develop a static number of tabs, in which I managed a fixed set of data inside each of these tabs. I must develop a page with all the entity's fields and all the rules, and then the web application administrator set which informations must be available for each tab from the same page detail developed. The tabs in which there's a list could be displayed or not, and the data in the list follow the grants setted by the web application administrator.
2) the web application administrator can specify all the data inside a tab: every tab will be built indicating which fields show or edit if the user has the grants. For example for entity1, we could define a detail page for user1 with field1, field3 and field2, while for user2 we could define the detail page with tab1 within field2, and a second tab, tab2 within field3.
3) the web application administrator can specify the layout inside the tab, indicating the pixel position inside the tab, or the application could provide a visual tool, in HTML, in which there is a design area, and in which the web application administrator clicks in a point and positions in it an information, and even specify the style's properties (color, font, background,...)
4) the application must provide to the users the possibility to define new fields for an entity, and must manage them adding in whichever tab for that entity. For such informations will be possible only management without controls except the controls of type (data, int, money, ...)
In my opinion point 3 I think it's part of a report tool and not of detail visualization; moreover all the styles of a page must be personalized, not only the informations contained inside the tabs. I think the only solution in a highly configurabile application is to show the search/detail fields 1 for row, and not with a positioning based on pixel coordinates or positioning with a RAD tool.
I ask to you:
- have you ever seen or realized web application that they supply application design tools within the same application, realized in HTML+Javascript?
- is realizable this kind of application?
- ...any suggestion to supply for proceeding?
Honestly my ideas are to realize points 1 and 2; I suppose point 3 is not feasible and that the result of the styles customization is little appropriated; for point 4 I suppose to simplify the management of new data by managing all the new ones inside the same tab, or I will have to think another possible solution...
Thanks to everyone has interesting ideas or suggestions to give.

Answer 1

have you ever seen or realized web application that they supply >application design tools within the same application, realized in >HTML+Javascript? Yes, Oracle HTML DB is one such purchasable off the shelf :)
is realizable this kind of application? I would think so - yes. It requiresa good team - 4 or 5 developers with excellent jsp/servlet knowledge :)
- ...any suggestion to supply for proceeding? Such kind of functionality is achievable only in 1 way-DB, always. You would store the information for each entity and the permissions for each attribute of that entity per user in the db. You can consider having roles (teams), assign permissions to the roles and then add users to the roles so that they inherit the permissions. You should be able to ovderride the permissions per individual user too.
I would say you first plan this out in a piece of paper, convert it into relationships in the db. Implementing the jsp solution is by far the easist (& tedious :)), IMO
ram.