Code Generation on Steroids: Enhancing COTS Code Generators via Generative Aspects

Commercial of-the-shelf (COTS) code generators have become an integral part of modern commercial software development. Programmers use code generators to facilitate many tedious and error-prone software development tasks including language processing, XML data binding, graphical component creation, and middleware deployment. Despite the convenience offered by code generators, the generated code is not always adequate for the task at hand. This position paper proposes an approach to address this problem. We utilize the power of aspect oriented programming (AOP) to enhance the functionality of generated code. Furthermore, our approach enables the programmer to specify these enhancements through an intuitive graphical interface. Our proof of concept software tool provides event-handling aspect/aspects that enhance the functionality of the XML processing classes automatically generated by a commercial of- the-shelf code generator, Castor.