Yasuyuki, short Yasu, is Supportability Engineer at Liferay. He's working out of Japan for ~8 years now, and in that time has started an interesting side project that you might be interested in. Well - I was interested, so I asked him for some time and we talked about it: Damascus.
Here are some of the topics that we talked about:
Yasu is working on Damascus, an extension of ServiceBuilder that helps you set up a new project extremely quickly. And it's documented.
Its purpose: Quick generation of master data applications, that you can edit further to enrich as a proper application
Starting from a json file, you'll generate persistence and UI for multiple Liferay Portal versions
A similar (but discontinued) project was mentioned on Radio Liferay in episodes 30 and 32: XmlPortletFactory.
What to do to make Damascus an officially maintained project
REST additions in Damascus
Updates of the tool to 7.3, and of custom code generated with Damascus (should be easy)
Freemarker to Java ratio - what it's like to write code that generates code.
Best Practices and where they're worked around in the generator
The heritage of the name Damascus, and how it relates to Liferay's "blade" tool
Bonus Tool: DummyFactory