ECOOP / Tutorial 02

Source Code Generation: Concepts, Techniques and Tools

Topic	Source Code Generation
Goal	introduce different techniques of source code generation in the context of MDA
Style	presentation with many examples and discussion

Abstract

Program Generation as a means for software development has been around for a long time in enterprise systems as well as in embedded software development. However, because of the proliferation of generative programming, product line engineering and most recently OMG's Model Driven Architecture, program generation techniques are getting more and more important these days. However, in my day-to-day work I often come across projects that use totally inadequate code generation tools; or people, who consider code generation to be fundamentally evil for various reasons. To remedy both of these phenomena, this tutorial provides an introduction to the most commonly used source code generation techniques. It explains how and where these techniques can be used efficiently. It sets these techniques into the context of model transformations, source code generation, source code transformation, as well as byte code rewriting and reflection. The main part of the tutorial focuses on the second item: generating source code from models. This is particularly interesting in the context of MDA and we'll introduce different dode generation technologies (such as template-based generators, frame technology, aspect weaving and AST-based approaches), show their use cases, discuss benefits and drawbacks and look at representative tools for each of these categories.

Presenter Profile

Markus Voelter

Markus Völter works as a freelance consultant for software technology and engineering in Germany. He focuses on the architecting and implementing large, distributed systems. Markus has been using model driven development and code generation tools in several projects. Markus is also the author of several magazine articles and patterns, a regular speaker at conferences and co-author of Wiley's "Server Component Patterns - Component Infrastructures illustrated with EJB". He can be reached at voelter@acm.org or www.voelter.de

Details

Presenter(s)	Markus Voelter (voelter - ingenieurbüro für softwaretechnologie)
Date Duration	Tuesday 22, half day, morning
Level	intermediate to advanced
Targeted Audience	Developers interested in code generation to make their day-to-day work more efficient, those who need to "mass-produce" software in the context of software system families as well as MDA-tool vendors who need to learn about how to generate code from their models.