Code Generation and Modeling, the lazy approach to Software Development

The old cliche goes that, the “Good programmers are lazy” and sometimes even dumb mostly because they always try to find the easiest solutions to the problem (dumb bit) by using as little effort as possible(lazy bit).

Being lazy as I am, I’m always looking for “easier” and quicker ways to generate software artifacts/applications from conceptual models with as little coding and hand-cranking as possible. The downside is that, one has to invest  significant amount of time and effort to learn  the different tools and frameworks that  can be used to achieve exactly that.

The one tool I have had experience with over the years is AndroMDA, but at the moment I’m looking at Tigerstripe to see what can be made out of it.

AndroMDA

AndroMDA was the very first tool that I actually used to turn my “dreams” of Model Driven Architecture and Engineering (MDA/MDE) into reality. It can generate mostly Java oriented software artifacts but it also supports .NET. The good thing is that, you can use AndroMDA to generate anything, you just have to remember to write a cartridge for it. Cartridges are like AndroMDA plugins that specify the translation from UML’s Platform Independent Model(PIM) into whatever your target platform’s artifacts are.

Tigerstripe

Another tool that I’m looking at recently is the Tigerstripe project which is an eclipse modeling tool with specific support for Telecommunication models like Managed Entities etc. The tool has recently been open-sourced from the commercial version of Tigerstripe@tigerstripedeve.net.