Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on FAMIX and MOOSE in Software Reengineering (FAMOOSr'09)

International audienceThe goal of the FAMOOSr workshop is to strengthen the community of researchers and practitioners who are working in re- and reverse engineering, by providing a forum for building future research using Moose and FAMIX as shared infrastructure. Research should be collaborative and supported by tools. The increasing amount of data available about software systems poses new challenges for reengineering research, as the proposed approaches need to scale. In this context, concerns about meta-modeling and analysis techniques need to be augmented by technical concerns about how to reuse and how to build upon the efforts of previous research. That is why Moose is an open-source software for researchers to build and share their analysis, meta-models, and data. Both FAMIX and Moose started in the context of FAMOOS, a European research project on object-oriented frameworks. Back in 1997 Moose was as a simple implementation of the FAMIX meta-model, which was a language independent meta-model for object-oriented systems. However over the past decade, Moose has been used in a growing number of research projects and has evolved to be a generic environment for various reverse and reengineering activities. In the same time, FAMIX was extended to support emerging research interest such as dynamic analysis, evolution analysis, identifier analysis, bug tracking analysis, or visualization. Recent work includes analysis of software architecture and semantic annotations. Currently, several research groups are using Moose as a platform, or FAMIX as a meta-model, and other groups announced interest in using them in the future

Run-Time Evolution through Explicit Meta-Objects

Software must be constantly adapted due to evolving domain knowledge and unanticipated requirements changes. To adapt a system at run-time we need to reflect on its structure and its behavior. Object-oriented languages introduced reflection to deal with this issue, however, no reflective approach up to now has tried to provide a unified solution to both structural and behavioral reflection. This paper describes Albedo, a unified approach to structural and behavioral reflection. Albedo is a model of fined-grained unanticipated dynamic structural and behavioral adaptation. Instead of providing reflective capabilities as an external mechanism we integrate them deeply in the environment. We show how explicit meta-objects allow us to provide a range of reflective features and thereby evolve both application models and environments at run-time

Meta-environment and executable meta-language using smalltalk: an experience report

Object-oriented modelling languages such as EMOF are often used to specify domain specific meta-models. However, these modelling languages lack the ability to describe behavior or operational semantics. Several approaches have used a subset of Java mixed with OCL as executable meta-languages. In this experience report we show how we use Smalltalk as an executable meta-language in the context of the Moose reengineering environment. We present how we implemented EMOF and its behavioral aspects. Over the last decade we validated this approach through incrementally building a meta-described reengineering environment. Such an approach bridges the gap between a code-oriented view and a meta-model driven one. It avoids the creation of yet another language and reuses the infrastructure and run-time of the underlying implementation language. It offers an uniform way of letting developers focus on their tasks while at the same time allowing them to meta-describe their domain model. The advantage of our approach is that developers use the same tools and environment they use for their regular tasks. Still the approach is not Smalltalk specific but can be applied to language offering an introspective API such as Ruby, Python, CLOS, Java and C

MSE and FAMIX 3.0: an Interexchange Format and Source Code Model Family

Software systems exceeding a certain critical size easily become difficult to maintain and adapt. Requirements change, platforms change and if a system does not evolve properly, its usefulness will decay over time. This document presents MSE a robust, scalable, extensible interexchange format and FAMIX 3.0 a family of metamodels to represent source code

Evaluating Code Duplication to Identify Rich Business Objects from Data Transfer Objects

Java Enterprise Applications (JEAs) are complex software systems written using multiple technologies. Moreover they are usually distributed systems and use a database to deal with persistence. A particular problem that appears in the design of these systems is the lack of a rich business model. In this paper we propose a technique to support the recovery of such rich business objects starting from anemic Data Transfer Objects (DTOs). Exposing the code duplications in the application's elements using the DTOs we suggest which business logic can be moved into the DTOs from the other classes

Visualizing and Characterizing the Evolution of Class Hierarchies

Operator Figure 4: A Class Hierarchy History Complexity View of the evolution of five hierarchies from the Jun case study. The cyan nodes and edges denote removed classes and inheritance relationships

Why Smalltalk Wins the Host Languages Shootout

Integration of multiple languages into each other and into an existing development environment is a difficult task. As a consequence, developers often end up using only internal DSLs that strictly rely on the constraints imposed by the host language. Infrastructures do exist to mix languages, but they often do it at the price of losing the development tools of the host language. Instead of inventing a completely new infrastructure, our solution is to integrate new languages deeply into the existing host environment and reuse the infrastructure offered by it. In this paper we show why Smalltalk is the best practical choice for such a host language

Pervasive Software Visualizations

A picture tells a thousand words. We all know that. Then why are our development tools showing mainly text with so much obstinacy? Even when visualizations do make it into our tools, they typically do not make it past the periphery. Something is deeply wrong. We argue that visualizations must become pervasive in software development, and to accommodate this goal, the integrated development environments must change significantly

The Moldable Inspector: a framework for domain-specific object inspection

Answering run-time questions in object-oriented systems involves reasoning about and exploring connections between multiple objects. Developer questions exercise various aspects of an object and require multiple kinds of interactions depending on the relationships between objects, the application domain and the differing developer needs. Nevertheless, traditional object inspectors, the essential tools often used to reason about objects, favor a generic view that focuses on the low-level details of the state of individual objects. This leads to an inefficient effort, increasing the time spent in the inspector. To improve the inspection process, we propose the Moldable Inspector, a novel approach for an extensible object inspector. The Moldable Inspector allows developers to look at objects using multiple interchangeable presentations and supports a workflow in which multiple levels of connecting objects can be seen together. Both these aspects can be tailored to the domain of the objects and the question at hand. We further exemplify how the proposed solution improves the inspection process, introduce a prototype implementation and discuss new directions for extending the Moldable Inspector