Pragmatic Prose

The Prometheus Device

Pragmatic Labs is pleased to announce its second product offering tentatively code named "Prometheus"

Simply stated; Prometheus is a code generation tool for .NET applications.  However, Prometheus goes a step further then most generation tools.  Most code generation tools are tier specific, meaning that they target one tier of the application.  The most common example of this is the data access layer generator.  Generators of this type usually read a database schema and generate code for CRUD operations on the database

Prometheus is a step beyond the single tier generators.  Prometheus allows an application to be defined in a tier independent schema file using XML.  From this schema Prometheus generates the database creation script, stored procedures, the data access layer, the business logic layer and the user interface.  The reason this works is there are certain common patterns that emerge when building applications.  Harnessing the experience of developers and the distilled knowledge of design patterns, a rather full skeleton of an application can be generated very rapidly. 

 Prometheus allows for code extensibility with either inheritance or region directives.  No matter how good a code generator is there is still a need for manual coding to handle business logic and special case situations.  Prometheus seeks to coexist with manual code and provides a clear separation between generated and manual coding.

 Prometheus is currently scheduled for release in the fall of 2005.