Few months ago I have started with development of a large web-application project from scratch. I had the chance to write the architectural design and to choose the concrete tools and technologies that will be used.
The decision was to use MySQL as database, Hibernate as ORM framework, Spring IoC for managing business services and Spring MVC for presentation layer. It was obvious that it would be nice if some of the repeating and predictable code to be generated: DAO classes, CRUD service classes, etc.
I made 2 days long 'googling' for a Java code generators. What I have found was either:
- too complex for my case and required a lot of time investment
- not flexible enough
- there were few good tools but they are either paid either obsolete and no more supported
At this moment I realised that I just can write myself a simple generator that will be the perfect for my scenario. Later I thought that many people may face the same problem and decieded to make this tool more generic so to be able to solve wider set of problems. And here the idea for IJGenerator (Intelligent Java Generator) was born.
My vision is that the idea of tools like code generator is to save efforts and time and that's why they have to be easy to use and not to require weeks of reading and research just to get it started.