Automatic Command Line Interface Code Generation for REST Based Web Services

Abstract

Automatic programming is the branch of computer science which aims to develop computer programs which can generate other computer programs. In this paper, we have proposed a command line interface (CLI) code generator which will generate CLI code for REST based web services. We observed a repetitive pattern in the CLI code for different REST based web services. Thus, once a developer develops one CLI, developing more CLIs become a mundane task. But it still requires a lot of time and effort, thus giving rise to the need of a tool which will automate the process. Apart from reducing the time and effort involved in CLI development, the use of the automation tool will help to bring consistency in the code across different CLIs. This tool reads the OpenAPI specification (also called swagger specification) as input and generates the CLI code for that web service as output. The code generation process is based on the use of templates.  As per our testing we have observed that this tool generates CLI code with an average accuracy of 50.83%.