Angry Coder speaks out on code generation
Jonathon Goodyear has some comments on code generation in this article on his site, and then some additional comments
in this
blog entry. He does not seem to think very much of code generation, and the
points that he makes in the article are very valid when you consider the tools
he was looking at. What he misses is that there are code generation tools out
there like CodeSmith which make it very easy to generate select
parts of your application. For instance if you currently have all of your stored
procedures created in your database, generating the DA methods
using codesmith is very easy and time saving. Using a generation tool in
this method does not force you to subscribe to a particular application design
and since you are just generating the actual code you can modify/customize it as
much as you want. This does not mean you are tying a business entity to a
particular table, but rather to a stored procedure which could pull from a
number of tables or views. I do not think Code Generation will ever replace
developers, but I think it can be an important and invaluable tool of the
developer.
-James