CodeWorker or “Is There Any Other Way of Working?”
When I bought the French magazine called Login:, that was because of the big lizard on the cover. I’m fond of lizards, that’s probably why. But it’s another article which attracted my attention.
CodeWorker is a parsing tool as well as a source code generator. The article, pretty simple to understand, gave only a glimpse of the full power of the beast. I was really impressed. And the more I thought of it, the more I was considering using it on the project I am currently working on, for generating:
- DTOs;
- DAOs;
- managers and façades;
- Struts classes.
I only started this afternoon from examples and I did the first three items in the list above, generated from the SQL scripts creating the tables. Plainly speaking, the whole business tier is now virtually implemented. What was supposed to take at least 10 days only took less than 4 hours. Once the Struts classes are generated, there will be just a few blanks to fill in, a few methods to add and pages to decorate – still a dreadful jigsaw to my eyes, however. Simply amazing.
The applications of such a tool are just unlimited. Just think of a PHP website with Smarty; you write the scripts for handling CRUDs via Smarty with the proper CodeWorker templates as well as the SQL scripts – and you’re just ready to begin a project in excellent conditions.
Now, that being said, such a powerful tool has drawbacks: it is indeed very tough to master and it takes a while to get acquainted with the templating language. But all in all, it’s more than worth it. Certainly for me a brand new way of working; the fewer lines of code, the fewer mistakes I do and the better I feel.
