Most developers often look at code generation with skepticism and assume that the generated code will be incomprehensible and/or of low quality.

However, under the right circumstance, code generation can be an important asset in the developer tool belt. For example, if you are a Java developer you can easily find a large number of code generation tools (e.g. search for “code generator” in any search engine). However, most of the tools usually require a time commitment that makes code generation unattractive (except for niche domain such as Data Access Object code generation or simple JSP/HTML form generation where a large number of artifacts can be generated). However, one tool that have been recently surfaced seem quite promising. The ThinkUI SQL Client tool allows Java developers who are familiar with the Apache Velocity template engine to easily generate code (or any text output) based on database meta data. This approach allows developers to customize the generated code to their preferences and since the tool is quite simple to use, the initial time investment is minimal. For example, you can create customized Java bean classes for all your database tables/views is matter of seconds. This gives you plenty of time to customize the formatting and javadoc of the template to suite your needs.