Use Eclipse JET to Automate Model-Driven Development Aspects

he continuously evolving Eclipse platform aids software developers in all phases of their work activities from modeling to coding to testing and deploying software artifacts. It is an aggregation of many collaborating components, each one performing a specific role and targeting a specific audience. This article demonstrates how to use one of these components, Eclipse JET, a specialized code generator tool that plays an important role in the modeling phase of a software project.

JET is one of the 21 projects bundled in the Eclipse Europa release. More precisely, it belongs to the Eclipse project Model To Text (M2T), which provides ready-to-use engines that perform model-to-text transformations. You can use JET to perform the following tasks:

• Introduce or strengthen Model Driven Development (MDD) practices in your project (see Sidebar 1. Model Driven Development and Code Generation)
• Simplify and automate mundane tasks that require conversions and transformations between models (usually from a more abstract to a more detailed one)
• Enforce best practices and standards by automatically generating software artifacts designed to respect them