XBoot: A RAPID and Instructional Low-Code Generator for Spring Boot Applications

Developing secure and well-structured web applications using Spring Boot presents a significant challenge, as it requires developers to manage multiple layers, employ framework-specific annotations, and ensure authentication, authorization, and compliance with architectural standards. These complexities often lead to errors among students and novice developers. Although current low-code platforms reduce coding effort, they frequently compromise clarity, modularity, and maintainability. This paper introduces XBoot, a lightweight framework that utilizes a straightforward XML-based domain-specific language (DSL) to automatically generate modular and secure Spring Boot applications. By providing concise specifications for entities, services, routes, and user roles, XBoot generates database entities, service classes, controllers, user interface templates, and integrated security rules. Validation rules are directly enforced from the DSL, and built-in Swagger documentation facilitates interactive API testing. The evaluation was conducted in two phases. Initially, XBoot was validated by generating applications for student–course and flight-booking domains, where less than 50 lines of DSL resulted in 950–1350 lines of Java and HTML code, complete with security and documentation. Subsequently, 10 undergraduate students utilized XBoot in practice. All participants successfully generated and deployed applications within 2–20 min (average ≈ 7), compared to 45–120 min for manual implementation. On a 5-point Likert scale, students rated the reinforcement of layered architecture at an average of 4.0. These findings suggest that XBoot effectively eliminates common structural and security errors, reduces boilerplate complexity through concise DSL specifications, and maintains modularity and transparency-limitations often observed in traditional coding and other low-code platforms.