Building code generators with genesys: A tutorial introduction

Abstract

Automatic code generation is a key feature of model-driven approaches to software engineering. In previous publications on this topic, we showed that constructing code generators in a model-driven way provides a lot of advantages. We presented Genesys, a code generation framework which supports the model-driven construction of code generators based on service-oriented principles. With this methodology, concepts like bootstrapping and reuse of existing components enable a fast evolution of the code generation library. Furthermore, the robustness of the code generators profits from the application of formal methods. In this paper, we will show in detail how code generators are constructed with Genesys, in a tutorial-like fashion. As an example, we will build a code generator for HTML documentation from scratch. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.