An approach to model driven development and automatic source code generation of GUI controls

Generating source code from a model, using a model-driven development techniques (MDD), rapidly increases application reliability and substantially accelerates time-to-market, thereby reducing application development costs. The generated source code does not have its functional implementation, so besides MDD, it is necessary to create some additional tools that will fulfill this gap. This paper describes a design of a system for automatic model development and automatic source code generation that transforms specification into the product implementation. Specification contains data necessary for the implementation of GUI controls. Controls are integrated as a part of an Eclipse based IDE. To reduce the amount of source code that needs to be generated, reflection API Java feature is used. Reflection API is also used for developing JUnit Java tests, that verify the reliability of generated source code. Using the proposed algorithm 1960 GUI controls and 3920 JUnit tests are generated. Based on this approach it is estimated that time-to-market is reduced four and a half months and quality of source code is increased significantly, lowering the total cost of developing and maintaining application.