A template-based code generator for web applications

Abstract

The importance and usage of web applications grow every day. Today from small businesses to large-scale corporations, many institutions prefer web applications for both their internal and external services. Code size and complexity of these kinds of applications grow rapidly. This brings up the question of how to improve the development process of web applications. A solution can be to use code generators. This paper introduces a template-based code generator to improve the development process of web applications. The code generator was developed and integrated into a real-life web application. Today, the web application together with the code generator is actively used in industry. This proves that an effective integration of a template-based code generator into a real-life large-scale web application can be achieved. In addition, the effectiveness of automatic code generation to manual implementation was shown with experimentation. Throughout the experiments, bug-free code generation was observed. Also, 98.95% improvement in average development time, 93.97% improvement in average test run count, and 49.37% improvement in average code size was achieved.