Build.net: a graphical application generator for object-oriented software and sample applications

Abstract

Existing application and code generators are designed for domain-specific tasks. They are used in the intermediate steps of software development process and are notintended to develop full scale applications. BUILD.NET introduces a new graphical ap-plication generation framework for object-oriented software implementation. It utilizesa language-neutral representation of source code through dialog forms and flow dia-grams. This representation method allows non-programmers to develop object-orientedsoftware easily. The designed framework can convert this graphical representation intosource code in four different programming languages. Generated source code can becompiled into executable directly without using any external compiler or interpreter. Proposed application generation framework is tested on a complex software development project. An object-oriented discrete-event simulation package for flexible manufacturing systems, FMS.NET, is implemented by using BUILD.NET. This field study shows that this framework can easily be utilized on real life scenarios.