Overview
Introduction
Sculptor is an open source productivity tool that applies the concepts from Domain-Driven Design and Domain Specific Languages.
You express your design intent in a textual specification, from which Sculptor generates high quality Java code and configuration. You can use the concepts from Domain-Driven Design (DDD) in the textual Domain Specific Language (DSL). E.g. Service, Module, Entity, Value Object, Repository.
The generated code is based on well-known frameworks, such as JPA, Hibernate, Spring Framework and Java EE. Sculptor takes care of the technical details, the tedious repetitive work, and let you focus on delivering more business value - and have more fun.
The DSL and the code generation drives the development and is not a one time shot. The application can be developed incrementally with an efficient round trip loop.
Sculptor is useful when developing typical enterprise or web applications that benefit from a rich and persistent domain model.
Within 15 minutes you can go from scratch to a running application, including build scripts, Eclipse projects, domain model, JPA persistence, services and much more. Thereafter you can continue by evolving the design, add manual code and regenerate.
Sculptor is not an one-size-fits-all product. Even though it is a good start for many systems, sooner or later customization is always needed. Sculptor is designed and documented with this in mind. The generated result can easily be modified to meet your needs.
Strengths
- Easy to learn, intuitive syntax of the textual DSL, based on the concepts from DDD
- Textual DSL has a lot of productivity benefits over graphical tools
- Quick start, simple installation
- Quick development round trip, short feedback loop, it is not a one time shot
- Support for TDD and refactoring
- Existing IDE tools, such as refactoring, code assist and debugger will continue to be of service to you
- High quality of generated code
- Pick ‘n’ Choose Target Implementation, based on well known frameworks, best practices, and a lot of experience
- Generation of complete application from a single model, not only fragments that are hard to fit in to the overall design
- Great extensibility and customization
- Used with de facto standard build tool - Maven
- Based on Xtext code generation framework
- Can be used with text editor or any IDE, but DSL editor with error highlight, code completion and outline is provided for Eclipse users
- Easy to remove the tool, no runtime magic
License
Sculptor is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.
Issues and Improvements
Use the Forum for questions and discussion.
You can report bugs and feature request in the forum also. We will add them to issue tracking system: https://github.com/sculptor/sculptor/issues.
