views:

198

answers:

4

An all-purpose code generator/modeler, probably template-based, that can generate code in one or multiple (mixed) languages, with a dedicated, easy IDE (no tangled command-line tools), where you can develop and maintain your entire application from scratch, would be nice!

This generator/modeler would let you work on your model, and never on the resulting code (no round-trip necessary).

Do you know any such product, or is this still utopic?

A: 

codesmith ftw

DanWoolston
+5  A: 

Take a look at http://www.codesmithtools.com/

"a template driven source code generator that automates the creation of common application source code for any language (C#, Java, VB, PHP, ASP.NET, SQL, etc.)."

There's also www.mygenerationsoftware.com, but they only advertise support for "Template Based Code Generator Supporting Four Template Languages - JScript, VBScript, C# and VB.NET."

Also, look at the suggestions from this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/93595/do-you-generate-code-if-so-what-do-you-use-and-what-do-you-generate

amdfan
+1  A: 

Do you mean code generators for DAOs, XML parsing and generation, Serialisation, end-language model code, etc, from a model definition? Obviously business logic would be something else, unless you were going to handle that with a rules engine like JBoss Rules.

Axis 2 for Java can take a model definition as .xsd and generate a Java model and XML. DAOs could be handled by Hibernate, etc.

But I am not aware of any specific tools (although that CodeSmith looks pretty useful to me now I've had a look at it), although I have been thinking of generating such a tool for my own projects (writing DAOs, XML, etc, bores me to death otherwise), but a few pages in a notebook does not make a usable project :)

JeeBee
+1  A: 

For Visual Studio, there's T4 and this addon

http://www.t4editor.net/

There are also Blueprints

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/softwareplusservicesblueprints/

Lou Franco