RTET - A round trip engineering tool

Abstract

Generating codes from models and performing round trip engineering is a key concern in software development. It is vital that software related artifacts such as source codes and models remain in synchronization throughout the development process. Although there are a number of round trip engineering tools available, only a few of them have been adopted by the developers' community. The existing tools perform considerable round trip engineering, but, even then, developers have still lots of work to do to implement a complete system. Many of the developers would like to be able to automatically generate a deployable web application from a model and/or reverse engineer their source codes into models in only a few mouse clicks. This paper introduces our Round Trip Engineering Tool-RTET which follows the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm to generate a CRUD oriented application and performs reverse engineering to better meet requirements of developers in Java. The prototype is able to automatically generate a working version of a tiered application with a JSP presentation, EJB manager classes with built in functions in Java, and with an appropriate database model. RTET is also able to generate MVC web applications with JSF views and appropriate managed beans. These files are derived from an entity bean which itself is derived from a simple class diagram using eUML2 plug-in. From an existing user interface in JSP or JSF, RTET can also reverse engineer the page to generate an EJB manager class with all its CRUD functions and the corresponding entity bean.