Having already explained the general code generation structure and operation in Section 3.3, this chapter will focus on the Java-specific code generation topics. These include the generation of the test environment user interface implementation and the batch file that will take care of the compilation and execution of the generated code.

As we have already seen in Section 3.3, part of the UI generation has already been taken care of by the ‘_Display’ subgenerator, which produces the generic definitions of buttons, icons and time zone slots. In addition to these, a physical implementation for the UI is still needed. A subgenerator called ‘_create MainFrame’ takes care of creating the test environment main window, while ‘_Java_Applet’ handles the UI generation for each individual Watch model. An example of the latter is shown in Listing 1, in which the generated Java code defines the Watch model as a subclass of AbstractWatchApplet and adds the initialization for the new class.

public class Ace extends AbstractWatchApplet {

  private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

  public Ace() {
    master=new Master();
    master.init(this, new DisplayX334(), new TASTW(master));
  }
}

As the standard Java SE Development Kit does not come with any make-like tool for automating the build process, and we want to avoid an additional dependency on Ant or something similar, we handle the build compilation details on our own. The build process requires two files, both created by the ‘_create make for Java: Windows’ subgenerator:

Listing 2 shows the contents of makeWatch.bat:

@cd /D reports\WatchModels\src\
@if exist *.class del *.class
@echo on
"C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-25\bin\javac" -d ..\bin @javaFiles
@cd ..\bin
"C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-25\bin\javaw" com.metacase.watch.generated._WatchModels
exit

When executed, the makeWatch.bat first changes to the folder that contains the generated Java code and deletes the existing .class files if there are any. After that it compiles all .java files listed in javaFiles using the standard Java compiler from Java SE Development Kit. The compiled .class files will be placed in a folder created for the binary files. After the compilation the makeWatch.bat will change to this folder and execute the compiled code.