Model Base generation of a 3 tier application

Foreword 'Time flies when you're having fun', is a remarkable proverb. Looking back on this past year, I can certainly state that time did play some tricks on me. However boring software engineering may seem to outsiders, I truly had a lot of fun in dealing with the challenges we were confronted with. And, as the saying goes; time was flying fast indeed. I would sincerely like to thank all of my teachers for doing their best. I would also like to compliment Mr Bijpost, for he was an excellent mentor during my internship period. Last but not least, I want to thank my family and my friends for their unlimited support. Summary Creating a data model before starting the actual project offers many benefits. The data model serves as view of the system. There are numerous tools for creating a data model (Fully Communication Oriented-Information Modelling FCO-IM, Unified Modelling Language UML). The research in which I was engaged, deals with the ability of generating a complete system, with a 3 tier architecture conform J2EE by taking the data model as input. Before building the generator, I had to do research about code generation concepts. I also had to look at different already existing generators in order to find out what these are capable of. Last but not least I had to do a lot of experimenting with J2EE. The vision of J2EE to database is very simple. J2EE tries to get on top of a database to reduce the effects of the impedance mismatch (the difference between OO and RDBMS). Every table is represented by an Entity Bean and each instance of the bean represents a row in that table. Relationships and primary keys are also taking in consideration. The generator should consider many aspects that are important in software construction. The generator should be easy to use and the generated files should be provided with different features such as comments and exception handling to satisfy the needs of different users. The generator generates the user interface layer (HTML/JSP and Swing), the business layer (EJB) and the database. Using a data model to generate the three tiers will bring us many advantages. It can save a lot of time and it can increase productivity and quality. The generated files in different layers can work together and they are combinable in one architecture.