Model Based Full Code Generation Case Studies

This was a case-study type talk by a very nice Finn, by the name of Juha-Pekka Tolaven. He showed 17 different examples from around the world where model based code generation was successfully used. Examples ranged from configuration data generation for telecoms switches to generating whole interactions in a car infotainment system.

I got the idea that when the domain was sufficiently small, then it was possible to create a parser that could generate a complete set of code for a specific environment or set of environments. The trick was to start small and have a real domain expert nearby. With these pre-requisites in place, generation times were about 3 times shorter than using normal methods (this was proven, by the way, in a control study in the United States Air Force) .

Many of the examples had used the Eclipse Modelling Framework, or the Rich Client Environment as a gui and many were used on specific platforms - you didnt see code being generated for windows-linux-mac etc,etc,etc, but there was a large variation in target languages (Assembler, Python, C++, XML and Java).

The style of the talk was also excellent. English, was obviously not Mr. Tolaven's mother toungue, but he used a very slow, clear, style that would be a lesson to the German native speakers making presentations here.