Automation of web application development in Ruby on Rails

This thesis focuses on the issue of automating web applications in Ruby on Rails and presents a comprehensive approach to dealing with this challenging topic. The main goal of the thesis is to create a template script capable of generating a Ruby on Rails web application that utilizes modern technologies and adheres to best practices. A secondary goal is to analyze the problems associated with generating web applications, and the final partial goal is to explore the use of UML diagrams for web application generation. Through the Design Science Methodology, an analysis of the current state in the field of development automation was conducted, leading to the identification of main obstacles, particularly in the transformation of application model designs into source code. An analysis of the possibilities for using UML diagrams for generating web applications was also performed. The thesis then proposed a system for generating web applications based on UML class diagrams, utilizing the PlantUML tool and a Ruby syntax analyzer. The implementation of this system, which respects best practices in MVC application development and object-oriented programming, enabled the creation of a script for generating source code. The generated application was deployed and tested in a production environment, where it met the basic requirements, but should be considered a prototype suitable for further development. The results of the work show that while full automation is challenging and resource-intensive, the provided procedure offers significant time savings and facilitates developers' work, and can serve as a solid foundation for further research and development in this area.