Prof. Dr. Ulrich W. Eisenecker M.A. from the University of Leipzig held a presentation yesterday about the use of Frames for Code Generation. He's a Co-Author of the book Generative Programming.

In the presentation he compared code generation based on C++ templates with some Frames based tools like ANGIE and XFramer (german).

My feeling about Frames based tools: They can't really compete with todays requirements. What I'm looking for when thinking about every day code generation, MDA, generative programming is

• small effective tools which don't lock me to one vendor selling a multi 1000 dollar tool


• ability to use the tool set in different environments (UI, Middle Tier, Data Access, Database Code


• use existing skills to transform data into code data (XSL or plain string concatination - using your well known programming language - can be very effective...)


• ability to use the tool in my favorite IDE, in build process and - if I want so - to generate code during runtime


• seamless integration of external DSLs (domain specific languages) when generating code

In most if not all of my requirements the presented approches fail. Nevertheless I think Generative Programming is a very interesting discipline and will hopefully help to solve some of problems when hooking shit together.

... and Microsoft will Open Source IIS 7.0 and .NET 2.0 (article in german) ...