Top 10 Principles for Software Generation (zt)代码生成的十大原则

source: http://www.skywayperspectives.org/blog/?p=688

 

I thought it might be worth while to start to document Skyway’s point of view regarding enterprise software generation, and the things that we think are important in this space. Our goal is to promote an active conversation and to solicit feedback of all sorts to ensure that we are working to address those areas that the industry feels are most important to the adoption of generative techniques and ultimately the simplification of delivering enterprise software.

 

Our Top 10 Guiding Principles for Software Generation

1. Offer Incremental and Additive Approaches - Developers should be able to realize the benefits of software generation on their own terms using as much or as little of a generation system as they wish
2. Extensibility is Key - The generation system must be extendible, configurable, and customizable at every level
3. Exploit Every Asset - The possible sources of inputs to the generation should be as diverse as possible and be expandable by developers
4. Support Every Developer - Provide tooling options that enable the widest set of development approaches and experience levels
   1. UML
   2. Skyway DSL / Visual Editors
   3. Other DSMLs (either UML-based or MOF/EMF-based)
   4. java
   5. Command Line Interface
5. Don’t Repeat ANYONE - Enforce the DRY principle by acknowledging that java code is not the only place, and often is not the first place, where the definition of software concepts may occur.
6. Offer Options for Post-Generation Changes - Changes to generated artifacts should be supported through a combination of:
   1. Source Round Tripping
   2. Intelligent Merging
   3. User Editable Dependency Injections
   4. Generation Componentization (Smallest possible components)
7. Avoid Lock-In – Generated artifacts should be indistinguishable from those that would be written by hand by a developer following best practices. Developers should be able to walk away from the Generation approach at any time.
8. Technology Changes as Often as the Requirements - Provide a clean translation from conceptual design to implementation remaining as permissive as possible to long term syntactical changes in the implementation language, architectural approach, and runtime framework
9. Generate on Demand, Automate by Request - Give developers control over when and how the generation and reverse generation processes will run (Automatically or “On Demand”)
10. Ex Uno Plures (Out of One, Many) - Deliver as much functionality as desired with as few inputs as required

 

In my next few blogs I’ll begin to add detail to these concepts and dive into the Skyway implementation a bit, where we are, and where we are going. I’d love to hear more feedback from the community about what principles you think are important. I’d also like to know what things you currently spend time on that you would like to see automated or generated in the future.  In the interim, you can check out our open source project here.

UPDATE - The second installment in this series of blog posts has been published here.

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