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.