Philipp Hauer's Blog

Engineering Management, Java Ecosystem, Kotlin, Sociology of Software Development

Model-Driven Software Development

Don’t generate (everything). Or: Framework beats Generator

Posted on Jan 7, 2016

Don’t generate (everything). Or: Framework beats Generator

When we apply Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) we write a generator which produces code out of a model. The promise is that among others, we can reduce the boilerplate code and accelerate the development. However, MDSD is not a cure-all and should be applied with sound judgment. In this post I cover some drawbacks of the generator approach, anti-patterns and present an alternative to generators: frameworks.