Kyle Cordes

I’m looking for a tool that makes it astonishingly easy to generate a web app that facilitates the editing of the contents of a bunch of database tables. I want to specify:

• which tables to allow editing (and viewing)
• which fields to allow editing (and viewing)
• which fields to show dropdowns for (rather than making users type IDs)
• what captions to use for all table and column names
• constraints to enforce
• constraints to notice and complain about, but not enforce
• a reasonable user management system for the web app (login/password/rights/etc.)
• rules that define row-level security, i.e. allow users to edit some rows of a given table but not others

I’d like a “generative” tool, one that spits out a fully functioning app which doesn’t depend on the original tool for runtime infrastructure.

The specification of the things above can be mostly textual. Drag-drop-UML doesn’t excite me all that much (though I’ve used such beasts for Java work before). The generation process must be customizable, since no tool is likely to meet 100% of my present and future needs.

The generated app will preferably be in PHP or Java. PHP seems reasonable as it is ridiculously easy to get up and running (at most, a few packages to isntall in a common Linux distro), and Java is reasonable because I use it heavily for other purposes anyway.

It should be possible to support several common DBs (SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL) with the flip of a switch or two.

The generation process should act like a build process – i.e. the “source” of the application would be the specificaiton file plus perhaps a few files work of manually tweaked code.

OK, so I’m asking for a lot.

… but there are dozens (or even hundred) of tools out there, both commercial and open/free, that meet at least some subset of the above. I Googled for a few minute and was overwhelmed at how many there are to look at.

A good starting point is the Code Generation Network, and a few of the specific tools I saw are phpCodeGenie, PHPMaker, Camino, Jag, JRpt, etc.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that none of them does everything I need – but that’s OK too, there is another layer of tools out there that make it easy to get start with my own generative approach: FMPP, Jostraca, etc.

Enough hoping for tonight. If anyone out there has had a very positive experience with any of these tools, for the kind of problem I’m looking to solve, I’d love to hear about it.

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A few clarifications, after the initial post:

• For this particular need, I prefer a generative approach to an “executable model” approach, though I think the latter might be the long-term winner in MDA.
• Yes, I know that I’m mostly asking for DB-centric CRUD operations, rather than a domain centric behaviour model. I have plenty of time for the latter approach (with lots of Java code, Hibernate, perhaps even a rules engine) in other place, but for today’s need, which is for the “admin” side of an application, DB-centric CRUD will do the job fine, with a little help from constraints, validation, etc.

Tags: programming

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