Genesys: service-oriented construction of property conform code generators

Abstract

This paper presents Genesys, a framework for the high-level construction of property conform code generators. Genesys is an integral part of jABC, a flexible framework designed to enable a systematic model-driven development of systems and applications on the basis of an (extensible) library of well-defined, reusable building blocks. Within jABC, Genesys manages the construction of code generators for jABC’s models. So far, Genesys has been used to develop code generators for a variety of different target platforms, like a number of Java-based platforms, mobile devices, BPEL engines, etc. Since the code generators are themselves built within the jABC in a model-driven way, concepts like bootstrapping and reuse of existing components enable a fast evolution of Genesys’ code generation library, and a high degree of self-application. Due to its increasing complexity and its high degree of reuse, Genesys profits from model checking-based verification. This way, jABC’s models of code generators can be automatically checked wrt. well-formedness properties, to ensure that the models do indeed only consist of building blocks which are suitable for the considered target platforms, and whose versions are mutually compatible. It can be also be verified that the code generation process only starts after a successful initialization phase, and that the generated code is always packaged with all the required libraries. We will illustrate the ease of extension and flexibility of the Genesys framework by describing the intended coverage of diversity while highlighting the high potential of reuse.