  Enterprise applications can be automatically generated from a sophisticated
OO design model based on model-driven approach. The design model contains
information about how to decompose the system into components, how to
encapsulate the system operations into classes, and how the objects of classes
collaborate to fulfill the functionality of the system operations. However, the
efforts to build the design model from a validated requirements model are not
proportional to the return. In practice, it is very desirable to have an
approach that can automatically generate standardized enterprise applications
directly from the validated requirements models. In this paper, we propose an
approach named RM2EA, which can reach this goal based on the contract-based
requirements model. We demonstrate the proposed approach through 13 case
studies. The evaluation result shows that the quality and efficiency of the
generated applications are almost equal to the applications implemented by
developers: firstly, we demonstrate that a popular type of enterprise
applications (i.e., a Jakarta EE application) can be successfully generated by
customizing and improving the set of rules; secondly, RM2EA can generate more
readable or maintainable code; thirdly, the enterprise applications generated
by RM2EA achieve similar performance in test results. Overall, the result is
satisfactory, and the implementation of the proposed approach can be further
enhanced and applied to software development in the industry.
