Architectural Concerns in Automating Code Generation

We report on the problems (and solutions) that we have been facing in defining an architecture that enables us to automatically synthesise production code (COBOL, CICS, SQL) from a higher level specification language that includes both primitives that handle business and architectural requirements. Our experience has been drawn from a real-life project in the banking industry where object-oriented models for large-scale projects were used. With these models, the application architecture was conceived to be robust to change, accommodating new behaviour in a systematic and encapsulated way.