From the Model to the Code Generator

Introduction

Surely, the design phase is one of the most important in the whole information system life cycle. The design phase allows realizing of the information system according to an engineering approach that by abstracting itself completely from the implementation details, it can adequately focus itself on the design aspects allowing for provision of a clear and precise methodological guideline to the developers. In this way, a high level of quality is guaranteed to the information system that will be not influenced by ad hoc decisions made up by the developers; decisions that, in the greatest part of the cases, are deprived of a suitable methodological support, and that inevitably bring to a diminution of the total quality of the project.

All of the details of the design phase have been underlined in the first part of the job and have been provided both approaches from the methodological point of view (specialized for the different typologies of users that will use the information system) and case studies oriented to understand the real applicability on the field of these methodologies.

At this point, it is essential to provide a technological aspect to the book thinking that the design methodologies are useful up until when they simplify the job of the designer: in the moment in which the design methodology adds complexity it is immediately abandoned by the designer.

During an accurate analysis of the designer requirements, it is evident that the tools that he/she needs are primarily of two types:

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  Tool of graphic design

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  Tool of automatic code generation

The tools of graphic design must have realized in order to simplify how much more possible the application of the methodologies of design previously exposed and to get, of course, a graphic representation conforming to the primitives of those methodologies.

In parallel, it is essential to have a tool that allows, starting from a machine readable representation of the gotten models, automatic production of the whole necessary code to obtain an application very close to that final application. To avoid that, this effort is not suitable, as it will be clearer subsequently, the generation of code will not be elegant in itself, but it will use some advanced technologies that will allow obtaining an application that, if on one hand, answers to the design choices, and on the other hand is a good base that can be used for the following development.

The Machine Readable Design

If the designer has the experience with the methodology, it is possible to not consider the problems coming from the methodology learning, but the problem related to the following transformation of the design in a machine readable format is not overcome. The transformation of the design in a machine readable format is very helpful in the following code generation phase.