Sub-method, partial behavioral reflection with Reflectivity: Looking back on 10 years of use

Context. Refining or altering existing behavior is the daily work of every developer, but that cannot be always anticipated, and software sometimes cannot be stopped. In such cases, unanticipated adaptation of running systems is of interest for many scenarios, ranging from functional upgrades to on-the-fly debugging or monitoring of critical applications. Inquiry. A way of altering software at run time is using behavioral reflection, which is particularly well-suited for unanticipated adaptation of real-world systems. Partial behavioral reflection is not a new idea, and for years many efforts have been made to propose a practical way of expressing it. All these efforts resulted in practical solutions, but which introduced a semantic gap between the code that requires adaptation and the expression of the partial behavior. For example, in Aspect-Oriented Programming, a pointcut description is expressed in another language, which introduces a new distance between the behavior expression (the Advice) and the source code in itself. Approach. Ten years ago, the idea of closing the gap between the code and the expression of the partial behavior led to the implementation of the Reflectivity framework. Using Reflectivity, developers annotate Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) nodes with meta-behavior which is taken into account by the compiler to produce behavioral variations. In this paper, we present Reflectivity, its API, its implementation and its usage in Pharo. We reflect on ten years of use of Reflectivity, and show how it has been used as a basic building block of many innovative ideas. Knowledge. Reflectivity brings a practical way of working at the AST level, which is a high-level representation of the source code manipulated by software developers. It enables a powerful way of dynamically add and modify behavior. Reflectivity is also a flexible mean to bridge the gap between the expression of the meta-behavior and the source code. This ability to apply unanticipated adaptation and to provide behavioral reflection led to many experiments and projects during this last decade by external users. Existing work use Reflectivity to implement reflective libraries or languages extensions, featherweight code instrumentation, dynamic software update, debugging tools and visualization and software analysis tools. Grounding. Reflectivity is actively used in research projects. During the past ten years, it served as a support, either for implementation or as a fundamental base, for many research work including PhD theses, conference, journal and workshop papers. Reflectivity is now an important library of the Pharo language, and is integrated at the heart of the platform. Importance. Reflectivity exposes powerful abstractions to deal with partial behavioral adaptation, while providing a mature framework for unanticipated, non-intrusive and partial behavioral reflection based on AST annotation. Furthermore, even if Reflectivity found its home inside Pharo, it is not a pure Smalltalk-oriented solution. As validation over the practical use of Reflectivity in dynamic object-oriented languages, the API has been ported to Python. Finally, the AST annotation feature of Reflectivity opens new experimentation opportunities about the control that developers could gain on the behavior of their own software

Open meta-modelling frameworks via meta-object protocols

Meta-modelling is central to Model-Driven Engineering. Many meta-modelling notations, approaches and tools have been proposed along the years, which widely vary regarding their supported modelling features. However, current approaches tend to be closed and rigid with respect to the supported concepts and semantics. Moreover, extending the environment with features beyond those natively supported requires highly technical knowledge. This situation hampers flexibility and interoperability of meta-modelling environments. In order to alleviate this situation, we propose open meta-modelling frameworks, which can be extended and configured via meta-object protocols (MOPs). Such environments offer extension points on events like element instantiation, model loading or property access, and enable selecting particular model elements over which the extensions are to be executed. We show how MOP-based mechanisms permit extending meta-modelling frameworks in a flexible way, and allow describing a wide range of meta-modelling concepts. As a proof of concept, we show and compare an implementation in the MetaDepth tool and an aspect-based implementation atop the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF). We have evaluated our approach by extending EMF and MetaDepth with modelling services not foreseen initially when they were created. The evaluation shows that MOP-based mechanisms permit extending meta-modelling frameworks in a flexible way, and are powerful enough to support the specification of a broad variety of meta-modelling featuresWork partially funded by projects RECOM and FLEXOR (Spanish MINECO,TIN2015-73968-JIN (AEI/FEDER/UE) and TIN2014-52129-R) and the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006

A Framework for Interoperability Between Models with Hybrid Tools

Complex system development and maintenance face the challenge of dealing with different types of models due to language affordances, preferences, sizes, and so forth that involve interaction between users with different levels of proficiency. Current conceptual data modelling tools do not fully support these modes of working. It requires that the interaction between multiple models in multiple languages is clearly specified to ensure they keep their intended semantics, which is lacking in extant tools. The key objective is to devise a mechanism to support semantic interoperability in hybrid tools for multi-modal modelling in a plurality of paradigms, all within one system. We propose FaCIL, a framework for such hybrid modelling tools. We design and realise the framework FaCIL, which maps UML, ER and ORM2 into a common metamodel with rules that provide the central point for management among the models and that links to the formalisation and logic-based automated reasoning. FaCIL supports the ability to represent models in different formats while preserving their semantics, and several editing workflows are supported within the framework. It has a clear separation of concerns for typical conceptual modelling activities in an interoperable and extensible way. FaCIL structures and facilitates the interaction between visual and textual conceptual models, their formal specifications, and abstractions as well as tracking and propagating updates across all the representations. FaCIL is compared against the requirements, implemented in crowd 2.0, and assessed with a use case. The proof-of-concept implementation in the web-based modelling tool crowd 2.0 demonstrates its viability. The framework also meets the requirements and fully supports the use case

Extending OntoUML Modelling Capabilities on the OpenPonk Platform

Tato práce se zaměřuje na rozšíření možností pro vytváření OntoUML modelů na platformě OpenPonk. Toto rozšíření je rozděleno do čtyř částí. Prvním rozšířením je grafické uživatelské rozhraní pro zobrazování výsledků verifikačního frameworku. Druhá část je prezenotvána novým frameworkem, sloužícím k automatické aktualizaci OunoUML verifikací. Třetím rozšířením je automatická detekce OntoUML anit-patternů. Poslední část se sestává z vybudování nové sekce portálu ontouml.org, obsahující dokumentaci k jednotlivým anti-patternům. V závěru práce je detekce anti-patternů demostrována na referenčním modelu.This work focuses on extending OntoUML modelling capabilities on the OpenPonk platform. This is done in four parts. First part of the expansion is graphical user interface for displaying results of the verification framework. Second part is represented by new framework, which is used for automatic updating of OntoUML verifications. Third part of the expansion is automatic detection of OntoUML anti-patterns. Last part consists of new section on portal ontouml.org, dedicated to anti-pattern documentation. End of this thesis focuses on demonstration of the anti-pattern detection using reference model