Experiences on Application Generators

The National Institute for Statistics is the organism responsible for acquiring economical data for governmental statistics purposes. Lisbon agreements establish a framework in which this acquisition process shall be available through Internet, so each survey should be considered as a little software project to be developed and maintained. Considering the great amount of different surveys and all changes produced per year on each make impossible this task. An application generator has been developed to automate this task, taking as a start point the Word or PDF template of a survey, and going through a graphical form designer as all human effort, all HTML, Java classes and Oracle database resources are generated and sent from backoffice to frontoffice servers, reducing the team to carry out the whole set of electronic surveys to two people from non I.T. staff.

Case-Based Reasoning Tools from Shells to Object-Oriented Frameworks

A Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) tool is software that can be used to develop several applications that require cased-based reasoning methodology. CBR shells are kind of application generators with graphical user interface. They can be used by non-programmer users but the extension or integration of new components in these tools is not possible. In this paper we analyzed three CBR object-oriented framework development environments CBR*Tools, CAT-CBR, and JColibri. These frameworks work as open software development environment and facilitate the reuse of their design as well as implementations.