On Developing Open Source MDE Tools: Our Eclipse Stories and Lessons Learned

International audienceTool development has always been a fundamental activity of Software Engineering. Nowadays, open source is changing the way this is done in many organizations. Traditional ways of doing things are progressively enhanced or even sometimes replaced by new organizational schemes, benefiting as much as possible from the properties of open source (OS). This is especially true in innovative areas such as Model Driven Engineering (MDE) in which new tools are constantly created, developed and disseminated, many of them coming from research teams. This poses some hard questions: What is the actual impact of OS in terms of tool development? How to best take advantage of OS communities? And what are the opportunities for research teams in this context? Capitalizing on experiences in developing MDE OS tools on top of the Eclipse platform and its license model, we try to give some insights on these questions in this paper

How to Deal with your IT Legacy? What is Coming up in MoDisco

International audienceThe Eclipse-MDT MoDisco open source project is part of the Indigo Eclipse Simultaneous Release. Here we describe how MoDisco can play a role in the evolution of (legacy) software, focusing on the latest project news

MoDisco in a Nutshell! How to Deal with your IT Legacy? Reverse Engineering using Models...

International audienceFor the second time, the MoDisco project is integrated in the yearly Eclipse Simultaneous Release. After Helios last year with its version 0.8.0, MoDisco version 0.9.0 is now officially released as part of Indigo. In addition to the already existing reverse engineering features (notably for Java), upgraded for the occasion, MoDisco comes this year with some interesting brand new components and dedicated JEE technology support. Of course, still model-driven

Megamodeling Software Platforms: Automated Discovery of Usable Cartography from Available Metadata

International audienceModel-driven reverse engineering focuses on automatically discovering models from different kinds of available information on existing software systems. Although the source code of an application is often used as a basic input, this information may take various forms such as: design "models", bug reports, or any kind of documentation in general. All this metadata may have been either built manually or generated (semi)automatically during the whole software life cycle, from the specification and development phase to the effective running of the system. This paper proposes an automated and extensible MDE approach to build a usable cartography of a given platform from available metadata by combining several MDE techniques. As a running example, the approach has been applied to the TopCased MDE platform for Embedded & Real-Time Systems

Combining Model-Driven Engineering and Cloud Computing

Service-orientation and model-driven engineering are two of the most dominant software engineering paradigms nowadays. This position paper explores the synergies between them and show how they can benefit from each other. In particular, the paper introduces the notion of Modeling as a Service (MaaS) as a way to provide modeling and model-driven engineering services from the cloud

Measuring Model Repositories

International audienceWe first present a model repository that has been built as part of the open source Eclipse GMT/AM3 project (Generative Modeling Technology/ATLAS MegaModel Management). Several contributed artifacts present in this repository are organized into sets of models of similar nature called zoos. The structure of the repository will be rapidly described. Its content is very rapidly extending, providing a publicly available source of experimental data to evaluate real life sets of model engineering artifacts. As an initial experiment, this paper shows how the elements contained in the AM3 zoos can be measured. Some examples of such measurements are provided for illustration purposes

Industrialization of Research Tools: the ATL Case

Research groups develop plenty of tools aimed at solving real industrial problems. Unfortunately, most of these tools remain as simple proof-of-concept tools that companies consider too risky to use due to their lack of proper user interface, documentation, completeness, support, etc that companies expect from commercial-quality level tools. Based on our tool development experience in the AtlanMod research team, specially regarding the evolution of our ATL model transformation tool, we argue in this paper that the best solution for research teams aiming to create high-quality and widely-used tools is to industrialize their research prototypes through a partnership with a technology provider

Model-Driven Interoperability of Dependencies Visualizations

International audienceSoftware tools and corresponding knowledge tend to be collected and packaged into platforms like Eclipse, MathLab or KDE. Their success and usefulness combined with their growing size and complexity rise issues about management of dependencies between their components and between the platform and other applications which rely on its plug-in system and/or provided functionalities. Such problems imply need for dependencies management tools in which visualization is a core feature. As dependencies are also a concern in domains like Object-Oriented Programming or Operating System packaging, we may expect to reuse corresponding works in visualization. But each domain and its related dependencies problem have induced their own hard coded viewing and browsing tools. In this article we present how we have reuse existing visualization tools for our platform cartography together with our own displays using a Model-Driven Interoperability approach to easily realize bindings between visualization tools

Representing Legacy System Interoperability by Extending KDM

International audienceThe complexity of software systems is continuously growing. An important part of this complexity issue concerns the interoperability between existing systems (i.e. legacy systems), where problems often occur due to heterogeneity in e.g. data, involved technologies or models. The Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) standardised by the Object Management Group (OMG) facilitates representation of existing systems, allowing them to be treated in a homogenous way at the model abstraction level. This paper defines a language suitable for modelling interoperability between these systems by extending KDM and introducing concepts that are specifically aimed at representing relevant interoperability information

ARTIST: Model-Based Stairway to the Cloud

International audienceOver the past decade, cloud services emerged as one of the most promising technologies in IT. Since cloud computing allows improving the quality of software and, at the same time, aims at reducing costs of operating software and hardware, more and more software is delivered as a service in the cloud. However , moving existing software applications to the cloud and making them behave as software as a service is still a major challenge. In fact, in addition to technical aspects, business aspects also need to be considered. The ARTIST EU project (FP7) proposes a comprehensive model-based modernization approach, covering both business and technical aspects, to cloudify already existing software. In particular , ARTIST employs MDE techniques to automate the reverse engineering and forward engineering phases in a way that modernized software truly benefits from targeted cloud environments. In this paper we describe the overall ARTIST approach and present several lessons learned