News
30. September 2005 - I just commited version 2.6.0 to CVS. This version can now handle insert code here sections not only in Java files, but also in JSP and XML files. I still need to do the rest of the documentation and I also still plan to write a small tutorial. Hence no offical release yet.
Overview
The apertoGenerator is a MDA / MDSD Tool for Java projects. It generates source code (or other files) based on an arbitrary XML model and some templates, which are written in a simple XML dialect (similar to XSLT).
There are a lot of other MDA Tools around, but most of those are either very expensive or doesn't really support model driven software development (MDSD). The most important differences of the apertoGenerator, compared to other MDA Tools, are:
- With the template tag
<insertCodeHere>you define a placeholder in a template, which leads to a section like
// -------- You can insert code here: --------
// -------- End of insert code section --------
in the generated Java source code. In this section you can write code, which is not lost, when the apertoGenerator is run again. Many open source MDA tools are only able to generate interfaces or abstract classes, from which you have to derive your own classes, to add code.
- Unlike most MDA tools, the model used to generate files is not UML, but an arbitrary XML file, for which you can define the structure. UML is probably the best way to draw class diagrams. But imagine, you want to model the input fields and layout of some form. I don't know how to do this in UML, but with XML this is straightforward.
The apertoGenerator is a tool, which I developed at my company aperto, because no other MDA tool suited our needs. This was mid 2003, since than it was further developed and already prooved to be very useful in several enterprise web projects.
Michael Tamm, 2004