Proposal: CobiGen as wizard

[hohwille]

Antoher visionary feature request for cobigen as there is such a high potential if you look further:
Just like Eclipse offers to create new class, interface or enum we should extend CobiGen to offer creation of new use-case, dialog, component, etc.
Then just enter the name of the "thing" to crate (or as required additional properties) and with a click on generate you have your new "thing" ready and working. Instead of existing Eclipse feature this will however not just create a single java file but an entire structure of packages with java files and potentially other types all defined by the templates behind this.

Even further CobiGen could offer refactoring of these "things". This would imply a reverse-mapping of the code to a template structure and back to the code. Then I could do a rename of a component that does not only rename a single file but the interface, implementation, instance variables, etc.
All tricky stuff I assume but this would really boost the developers performance and helps you to be more agile and flexible to changing demands.
Feel free to move this to an unplanned milestone with lower prio but we should IMHO have a workshop about the next-gen CobiGen and how it should be designed considering this and #164, #150 / #158, #123, #124, #157, #153, etc. We have to think far beyond the current implementation and design a new "template language" and "template configuration" that will support such use-cases and be highly maintainable. Then CobiGen templates will more or less become the architecture definition of your project. Maybe CobiGen core could also be reused to build an architecture analysis tool that "understands" if hand-written, generated or mixed code matches this defined architecture, render a high-level and clickable architecture of your code that allows to drill down. This way you would not only see tons of classes in packages but really components containing units (component-parts) with entity, UC, service, etc. around business data, etc.
If I am already dreaming you could also think about an architecture update just by getting a new release of the architecture definition (templates) and trigger the upgrade. But please do not get me wrong here. I have a strong vision but really want to go for the next step that brings us a working and usable solution better than what we have today. But you have to think big to take the small steps into the right direction.

[maybeec]

Nice, and good news: we are dreaming the same dream 👍

1. We are not that far away of what you thought of. Basically, this is the vision I am moving towards in my PhD. However, therefore the current templates have to be even more structured in a pattern like style. I will soon provide you an already accepted publication of a proposal of such kind of patterns, called Architecture implementation patterns (for short AIM Patterns). It is ongoing work but the right direction.
2. The research on reverse-mapping is currently in progress. There are approaches like this also using text-templates, but they are quite stupid and fight against whitespace and formatting stuff... horribile...
   So what we are currently working on is a parser for syntax-safe templates (the first draft will be implemented by @fkreis). The idea is to be able to span an AST of a language-specific template and thus start tree-matching algorithms to find correspondig code in the current code base. Therefore, @codepearlex started his research on clone detection based on tree structures.

Although, the work on the code base of CobiGen is quite silent these days, we are working on the next generation features. I am pleased to hear, that we share the same mind set about that!

[hohwille]

Awesome 👍

The research on reverse-mapping is currently in progress.

Lets have a coffee next week together. I already implemented this for a telco-media customer ~9 years ago. It used some graph-theory algorithm but was after all not complex and easier than I though initially.

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