Accelerate Application Development with AI

Sample full stack applications are crucial to support multiple activities, such as testing, validation and experimentation. However, their creation involves repetitive and less value-adding activities that are nonetheless essential. These often require considerable time and resources that can take software developers and engineers like you away from other, more meaningful and stimulating tasks.  

If you are looking for ways to streamline the development of applications for deployment testing, prototyping, proof-of-concept and other purposes, this blog post is for you! It shows you how to leverage artificial intelligence (AI)-based automation with Payara Starter to cut the time needed for one of the fundamental activities that many software specialists dislike, the creation of Entity Relationship (ER) diagrams. 

Raise your hand if this ever happened to you: you’re already overworked but need to create a quick proof-of-concept application under a tight deadline. To save time, you consider skipping the lengthy ER diagram design phase, thinking you can cut some corners without sacrificing too much quality.  

However, as you dive into development, maybe you realize you didn’t have the necessary domain knowledge to create the application. Or maybe you start encountering gaps in your data structure and unintended redundancies that weren't clear without an initial ER diagram. These issues force you to go back, rethink relationships and adjust code to fix mistakes. Ultimately, you end up needing more time than if you’d mapped out an ER diagram from the beginning. 

Busy developer schedules are often the norm, so it’s only normal for professionals to look for ways to shorten tasks. However, there is something more effective than cutting key tasks: relying on valuable productivity tools to drive efficiencies.  

What are ER Diagrams and Why do They Matter? 

ER diagrams, also known as ERDs or entity diagrams, are flowcharts presenting the elements making up a system, their attributes as well as their relationships. The visual representation offered by ER diagrams helps software developers, architects and other stakeholders have an immediate and intuitive overview of the overall application’s structure and how it operates. Ultimately, ER diagrams are largely used to support planning and design, but they can help considerably iterative development and continuous delivery as well as analytical and troubleshooting activities.  

Experienced developers may not feel the need to spend time drafting ER diagrams to start building their applications, especially if used solely for testing purposes. However, it is advisable not to skip this task, as ER visualizations are extremely valuable, particularly when working on large, complex applications. There is no denying that designing ER diagrams takes time, though, especially for large-scale projects.  

How to Speed up ER Diagram Creation  

What is Gen AI Automation? 

Generative AI (Gen AI or GenAI) is a type of AI that creates content, such as text, images, code and complex data structures, based on patterns it has learned from vast amounts of data, also known as training data. By combining the ability of machines to produce content with Gen AI models and automation techniques, it is possible to create systems that performs tasks autonomously. By opening the door to the intelligent automation of various tasks and processes, it is possible to improve efficiency and productivity.  

Using AI-Powered Automation for ER Diagram Generation  

Gen AI-powered automation can dramatically speed up the process of creating ER diagrams at the core of new applications while enhancing accuracy and scalability. In effect, the technology can reduce much of the manual work by suggesting and generating diagram structures based on specific project requirements.  

More precisely, Gen AI automation can deliver database schemas from predefined templates, reducing the repetitive aspects of diagram design and saving hours of specialists’ efforts. As a result, developers, analysts and architects can focus on building innovative features rather than investing in manually arranging entities, attributes and relationships. 

In addition, through the large language models (LLMs) that characterize Gen AI, users can intuitively adjust diagram details using natural language prompts and implement changes in real time. This helps software professionals move even faster.   

What is Payara Starter? 

Payara Starter is a source code generator designed to help developers, architects, analysts and other stakeholders improve productivity when it comes to generating, configuring and deploying sample projects. By using this tool, junior and experienced professionals alike can reduce traditional manual coding. As a result, users can streamline the development of full stack applications while benefiting from potential quality improvements.  

Is Payara Starter Low/No-Code? 

The short answer is no. Payara Starter is a developer-friendly tool that simplifies environment setup and deployment, but it doesn’t provide the low-code features typically seen in platforms aimed at non-developers, such as drag-and-drop development tools or visual modelling. 

How Does Payara Starter Work? 

Payara Starter delivers key productivity, efficiency and quality advantages through a user-friendly web interface where users can input their technical requirements to generate skeleton applications for sample projects. More precisely, you can choose your preferred JDK version, Jakarta EE profile, build tool (Maven or Gradle) and Docker support. The backend processes this information and leverages ER diagrams to generate project structure and files that you can download as .zip file to kickstart application development. 

In this form, Payara Starter is already an extremely valuable solution with unmatched flexibility and capabilities. This achievement didn’t stop our engineering team from enhancing this aid tool to deliver further productivity gains. How? By integrating AI functionalities within Payara Starter.  

How does Payara Starter Use AI? 

Payara Starter now features an ER diagram design tool that uses Gen AI to automate the creation of ER diagrams and source code, so that you don’t have to spend time creating it for your sample project. Let’s have a closer look at the ‘ER Diagram Designer’ section. 

The ‘Search ER Diagram’ offers a drop-down menu listing a number of predefined templates for various application types, such as customer relationship management (CRM), energy management systems (EMS) and sales tracking. These sample, pre-loaded ER diagrams were selected based on the most common systems and can support a variety of industry verticals, including insurance, real estate, education and pharmaceutical manufacturing. This can be particularly helpful to developers that may not have sufficient domain knowledge yet, as they can quickly get started while being presented with a unique experiential learning opportunity. 

After selecting the most suitable ER diagram template, users can modify them to suit their specific needs, as the ER diagram design is fully customizable. Doing so does not require in-dept technical skills, as the changes can be implemented through live chat support. More precisely, the tool uses natural language commands to process requests.  

In addition, you can get an immediate preview of the ER diagram and the respective source code, as changes are implemented on-the-fly and can be visualized instantly as the application structure is modified. Payara Starter’s Gen AI ER diagram generator also provides context-aware suggestions if you need to increase or decrease the number of entities and, consequently, the diagram size.  

To undo changes or reset the ER diagram (and its source code), you can easily go back to previous versions, as the tool stores information on the structure history. Once you are happy with the diagram, Payara Starter will create a downloadable application.  

Who can Benefit from AI-supported ER Diagram Designer? 

Multiple professionals can leverage Payara Starter and its AI-powered ER Diagram Designer to improve their operations. Here’s a quick overview of the top four types of users: 

• Software developers can quickly create, configure and deploy applications 

• Students and junior developers can take advantage of the ER diagram library provided to advance their understanding of different industries and their applications 

• Analysts can quickly leverage proof-of-concept applications and rely on a practical workflow to determine and implement project requirements 

• Architects can benefit from greater flexibility in selecting the technology stack for their projects while being able to guide their teams with best practices on the most effective architectural choices 

What to Consider When Using Payara Starter’s AI Function? 

Payara Starter and its ER Diagram Designer utilize only the most robust, coherent and stable AI functions to support high-quality application development. While these AI-powered tools can significantly streamline the design process, expert oversight is essential to ensure accuracy and adherence to best practices. In particular, as Gen AI assists in generating both the ER diagram and the source code, for the same diagram, it may produce different source codes at each attempt.  

For these reasons, the AI functionalities within Payara Starter are best suited for testing and development environments, where they can help accelerate initial setup and design without the risks associated with production use. In any case, the generated ER Diagram and source code should be reviewed carefully, as they may contain errors. 

In mission-critical production environments, it is crucial that software specialists take full responsibility for verifying and finalizing the application’s structure and content. Payara Starter’s AI tools can assist in the development phase, but production-level applications demand a high level of oversight to maintain stability, security and compliance with industry standards. 

Take the first step toward faster, smarter application development with Payara Starter and its cutting-edge AI-driven ER Diagram Designer. Check the platform now!