This paper provides an overview of a distributed system for automatic program generation from specifications. The system is written in and for the Java programming language, but many of the ideas should be applicable to most object-oriented (OO) languages.

To create a program using the proposed system, the programmer instantiates a Java interface that adds input and output variables to existing Java classes and relationships describing a new problem that should be computable from the existing classes. These enable the program to write a new Java program that solves the problem described. While this in itself is not new, the OO- and Java-based application should be of interest to both software engineers and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. (The author indicates that genetic algorithms could be used to create a solver to handle the relations that describe the computation.)

The important part of the paper is the author’s description of a distributed system that is built on his idea. The paper describes the architecture of the distributed system, without a lot of detail on the individual components. The system described consists of seven logical components: the object factory, the compiler, the knowledge base, the decorator, the planner, the code generator, and the component repository. The system uses the common object request broker architecture (CORBA) standard to manage the components of the system.

This paper was written at a very high level, and should be of interest to and readable by most software engineers. A more detailed description of each of the logical parts of the system would be a logical next step for one or more additional papers, to provide more detail on the methodologies used. I found the ideas to be very interesting, but would have liked to see a bit more detail.