There are a number of products that can be used to generate certain system components.

Several UML systems - such as Rational Rose - can take a UML description and generate stub class implementations.

The goal though is to go further. In the same way that the GPO model attempts to provide not just a persistence "mechanism" but a persistent "model", so the Alchemist attempts to generate a complete functional persistent model from a simple specification.

After developing several GPO systems, it became increasingly apparent that there were a number of patterns that could be applied to generate useful systems.

Whenever different methods were written, the question was asked "Why is this method required?".

It became increasingly clear that the vast majority of system design and implementation could be inferred from simple properties associated with the object model.