Application Generation Using MDA in CF (Chip Temms CFDJ article)
MDA (Model Driven Architecture) is a huge area of research and development in application generation. After Chip Temm’s recent article in CFDJ, I thought this would be a good time to discuss why MDA doesn’t work for me but why it may be a great approach for you to consider.
CFTemplate: The core code
I finally need to use the CF Template generator I wrote a few months back, so I’ve had a chance to clean up and to post the basic code (just the cfTemplate.cfc). As with LightWire this is still very proof of concept, so expect a little fiddling to play with this and lots of changes to the interface over the following few days.
[UPDATE] Thanks to Brian Rinaldi who showed me what an enclosure was in BlogCFC - there is now a download link at the bottom of this entry as well as the (non obvious) link above!
An Introduction to Code Generation
The wait is almost over for the CF Template code as I'm now back and thinking about generation (isn't it sad that an hour of work could take three months to get to?!). But first I wanted to post a solid introduction to code generation.
This is the resource to read and to point people to if they want to know what code generation is, how they should do it, the different approaches and the benefits of active over passive generators.
Mixing Hand Written and Generated Code
If you want to create an active application generator, one of the first problems you have to solve is how to mix hand written code with generated code.
How Does Application Generation Work?
Application Generation is as simple and profound as conditional logic and looping. You can learn it in 2 minutes, but mastering the subtleties can take years.
An application generator combines script templates with metadata to generate code which is then saved as files that can be run (or compiled and then run) just like any hand coded scripts. That’s it.
