This open question gave some good suggestions of some new features for this kind of tools, like: Q3 – In your opinion, what would make MDD tools more useful and attractive to programmers? Clearly, MDD tools need to find the sweet spot between language expressivity and tool simplicity here. Ī couple of students also mentioned but for the kind of scenario they would find the tool useful (this back-end admin generator), a tool like Telosys (or for what matters, most programming frameworks nowadays) that can generate a simple scaffolding interface from only a database definition could be simpler to use. Here a few mention a MDD tool could be used to generate the back-end part in web development projectĪnd It can be a great help for database management or a quick and dirty generation for a prototype but that for the front-end part, I think it is a waste of time specially because they had the feeling they would need to end up modifying lots of the generated code in the end since since this kind of tool will never be as configurable than a HTML/JS project. (5 – Totally sure, 1 – No way I’m doing that) but we always learn more from the cricisms □ Q2 – If you were working in a software company, how likely is that you would choose to use some kind of code-generation tool in your next web development project ? There were also some (but fewer) positive comments like: I think this is the tendency of the future. (5 – Very satisfactory, 1 – Totally unacceptable)Īmong the most cited (negative) reasons we had: lots of installation problems (I had to let them work in pairs so make easier for them to have access to at least one machine were the tool was working smoothly), lack of optimization of the deployed application (quite noticeable for a small application like the one we were doing, probably more reasonable when we move to more complex ones), sudden crashes and corrupted projects, good for prototyping but unsure if the if the method scales, lack of documentation and difficult to customize the code. Q1 – How would you mark the experience of using the code-generation tool? We already know that MDD pays off in the mid-term so they lack that long-term perspective when evaluating the experience On the “cons” side, it’s true that students are not professional developers having to build the same kind of applications again and again. This scenario (generation of a simple CRUD web application) should be the abc of code-generators since there was no complex dynamic behavior that would require any kind of behavioural model (state machines, pre/postconditions,…) so it was, IMHO, the best one to illustrate the benefits of MDD.I emphasized several times that the only thing I’d evaluate from the survey was that their reasons for (dis)liking the tool were well-argumented but, still, some students may have chosen to give a more positive review than what they really thought Note that the survey was mandatory and not anonymous.But before some things to consider before jumping to fast to conclusions: Probably a combination of the two.Īnyway, let’s take a closer look at what the (29) students said after their first experience with a code-generation tool. So it may be me that I’m not good as a teacher (luckily for my students and myself, my teaching days with undergrads are over) or that MDD tools in general are not yet good enough. In fact, I also failed last year, with a different tool. Well, based on the responses to a short survey I asked them to answer at the end of the exercise, I failed. I thought this was the perfect example to show them the wonders of code-generation and, even more, use this as a bait to turn them into strong advocates of model-driven engineering in general. The goal was to model a simple CRUD-based web application and then use a professional model-driven development tool to automatically generate and deploy the application without writing a single line of code. As part of my MDE course, I devoted four sessions (of around 3h each) to a code-generation exercise.
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