DARE-Web is a Web-based environment that supports domain analysis - the activity of identifying and documenting the commonalities and variabilities in related software systems. DARE-Web supports the capture of domain information from experts, documents, and code in a domain

Alonso, Omar

Frakes, William

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Association for Information SystemsAIS Electronic Library (AISeL)AMCIS 2000 Proceedings Americas Conference on Information Systems(AMCIS)2000DARE-Web: Domain Analysis in a WebEnvironmentOmar AlonsoOracle Corp., oalonso@us.oracle.comWilliam FrakesSoftware Engineering Guild, wbfrakes@yahoo.comFollow this and additional works at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2000This material is brought to you by the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been acceptedfor inclusion in AMCIS 2000 Proceedings by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contactelibrary@aisnet.org.Recommended CitationAlonso, Omar and Frakes, William, "DARE-Web: Domain Analysis in a Web Environment" (2000). AMCIS 2000 Proceedings. 100.http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2000/100DARE-Web: Domain Analysis in a Web EnvironmentOmar Alonso, Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, CA 94065oalonso@us.oracle.comWilliam Frakes, Software Engineering Guild, Sterling, VA 20165wbfrakes@yahoo.comAbstract     DARE-Web is a Web-based environment thatsupports domain analysis - the activity ofidentifying and documenting the commonalitiesand variabilities in related software systems.DARE-Web supports the capture of domaininformation from experts, documents, and codein a domain.Keywords: domain analysis, domain engineering,digital libraries, Web-based applications.Introduction     The process of creating an environment tosupport systematic reuse is called domainengineering.  Domain engineering has twophases: domain analysis and domainimplementation.  We define domain as anapplication area or business area (also calledvertical market).Domain analysis is the activity of identifying,storing, and documenting the commonalities andvariabilities  in related software systems in adomain.  These systems share common designdecisions.  Domain implementation is the use ofknowledge acquired in domain analysis todevelop reusable assets for the domain and thecreation of a production process forsystematically reusing assets to generate newproducts (Frakes et al., 1998).DARE     DARE (Domain Analysis and ReuseEnvironment) is a CASE tool that supportsdomain analysis—the activity of identifying anddocumenting the commonalities and variabilitiesin related software systems (Frakes et al., 1997).DARE supports the capture of domaininformation from experts, documents, and codein a domain.  Captured domain information isstored in a domain book (Arango et al., 1993)that will typically contain a generic architecturefor the domain and domain-specific reusablecomponents.The outputs of DARE include:1. a domain specific vocabulary.2. a faceted classification of systems in thedomain.3. domain templates which link facets withexplanatory text.4. a domain feature table.5. a generic architecture.6. reusable components.DARE has been developed in a series of fourresearch prototypes, the latest of which is DARE-Web. In this section we review these prototypesand use them to illustrate the major features andfunctions of DARE.The First Prototype     The first DARE prototype was developed in Con a UNIX workstation running X-Windows andMotif during 1994. This version of DARE wasused to explore the domain book metaphor, andto investigate automatic and semi-automaticword and phrase extraction and clustering. Theconcept of a domain book for structuring andrepresenting the outputs of the domain analysisprocess is important because it solves two hardproblems in domain analysis:• What should the output of domainanalysis be?• What are the criteria forcompletion, that is, how does thedomain analyst know when adomain analysis is done?494The book metaphor helps answer both of thesequestions: the output of domain analysis is adomain book, and the process is complete whenall sections of the domain book are complete.The book metaphor also brings structure to thewhole domain analysis process. Users write adomain book from front to back and the sectionsof the book are ordered according to the DAREdomain analysis method. Thus each part of thedomain book becomes a milestone and reviewpoint in the domain analysis process. Part 1 of adomain book, Domain Sources, is the input partof DARE where the material used in domainanalysis is entered. Parts 2 and 3, VocabularyAnalysis and Architecture Analysis, structure theoutputs of the domain analysis process. Theseparts also correspond to the two main steps of theDARE domain analysis method:• bottom-up analysis—validate the genericarchitecture and generic features throughanalysis of domain documents (text) andsource code;• top-down analysis—postulate a genericarchitecture and generic features basedon expert knowledge and experience.The domain book structure neatly organizes theoutputs of these two activities. The remainder ofthe domain book, the Glossary, Bibliography,Index, and Appendix, is end-matter that providesreference material and a search mechanism forlocating items in the domain book.The Second Prototype     We found that the C, UNIX, and X-Windowsenvironment did not allow rapid enoughdevelopment of DARE. We chose Visual Basicas a faster development environment, and thesecond DARE prototype was developed inVisual Basic 3 on a PC running Windows 3.1during 1995. We found that this environment cutdevelopment time about tenfold. Especiallyuseful was a commercial graphical editor VBXthat we were able to tailor to our needs. Thebook mechanism and the cluster editor from thefirst prototype were re-created, and several majorsubsystems were implemented, including:• the domain expert information entryforms and system feature table;• the system architecture editor;• the facet table;• the generic architecture editor and thegeneric feature table.DARE COTS     Even Visual Basic proved too slow adevelopment environment as time and projectresources became short. We therefore createdanother prototype using commercial-off-the-shelftools (COTS) and freeware. We found that thisprototype allowed us to create a version ofDARE with much of the planned functionality ina fraction of the time required for either C orVisual Basic.The DARE COTS implementation usingcommercial-off-the-shelf tools (COTS) andfreeware  is made possible through theidentification of a backplane that contains thetool slots needed by DARE. These are listed inthe table  below. Two implementations ofDARE-COTs have been done using thisbackplane model. The first version was done onthe Macintosh, and a later one was done inWindows at the request of a client. Table 1summaries the tools.Table 1. DARE-COTS BackplaneBackplane:Needed ToolsMacintosh WindowsDomain Book In Control MS-Word inoutline modeSource Documents MS Word MS WordText Analysis Concordance lexerExpert forms MS Word MS WordGraphicalArchitecture EditorInspiration InspirationFeature Table MS Word MS WordGlossary andBibliographyMS Word MS WordStemming PorterstemmerPorterstemmerCode Analysis Unix Tools,cflow, prof,cia.Unix Tools,cflow, prof,cia..495The main DARE-COTS tools include:• forms for acquiring general domaininformation from experts,• a graphical architecture editor forrecording system architectures,• a feature table for summarizing systemcommonalities and variabilities,• a suite of text processing tools forextracting a domain vocabulary from textsources,• a clustering tool for deriving facetedclassification schemes from the domainvocabulary and for identifyingcommonalities and variabilities,• an architecture editor for creating andrecording generic architectures,• a system feature table for recordingdecisions about commonalities andvariabilities in systems based on thegeneric architecture, and• a glossary, bibliography, index, andappendices for collecting and organizingreference information.In the next section, we discuss a version ofDARE for the WWW.DARE-Web     In the last couple of years, Web technologieshave emerged as an alternative to client-servercomputing. Given this trend we decided toexplore a Web-based version of DARE using aWeb-based computing paradigm.  This will allowdevelopment of and access to DARE domainbooks via WWW or Intranets.  This is importantbecause when developed, domain books willserve as the central resource for developing andmaintaining systems in a domain, and allpersonnel that work in that domain will need easyaccess.  In this particular case we can say thatDARE-Web is a domain specific digital library.Web-based computing allows the integration ofdisparate systems into a single and coherentenvironment (Vetter 1999).  Web-basedinfrastructure  is a reality in many areas likeeCommerce and it is starting to gain momentumfor software engineering projects (Gao et al.,1999).Architecture     Our proposed architecture uses a commercialInternet platform to handle pretty much all thecomputation (Oracle 1999).  The idea behindusing this type of technology is to manage all theinformation in one place while providing itsaccess from everywhere.Figure 1 shows DARE-Web high levelinfrastructure.  DARE-Web is an application thatsits on top of the HTTP-enabled database(Oracle in our case).  The application issues SQLstatements to query and retrieve all the assets thatare stored in the database.  When the databasesends back the result of a query, DARE-Webconstructs the asset content in HTML and displayit in the Web browser.Figure 1. DARE-Web high level infrastructure.There are three main components of DARE-Web: the asset manager, the book view, and theservice manager.   The asset manager provide allthe features and services for storing assets in thedatabase.  The book view component managesthe domain book internal structure as well as itsvisualization.  The service manager  providesmechanisms for adding new services to thesystem (in the current implementation there isonly one service: search). The storagerepresentation contains all the assets and itsmetadata  with XML tags. Figure 2 describes athigh level the software architecture.DAREWebbrowserHTTPHTMLSQLResultHTTP-enableddatabase496Figure 2. DARE-Web architecture.We are experimenting with two alternatives waysof implementing DARE-Web with Oracle tools.The first one is to write the application inPL/SQL using an HTTP package and a Webserver that supports PL/SQL cartridges.  Thesecond alternative is to use Java servlets for theapplication and JDBC for connecting to thedatabase.  A comparison of the two approaches isbeyond the scope of this paper.Relevant Features     There are several advantages of using adatabase for the Web implementation.  Adatabase backend implementation provides datasecurity, data integrity, scalability, andflexibility.  All those things are very importantwhen building Web-based infrastructure.Apart from all the DARE features we added asearch mechanism and the ability to define users(and therefore) roles.While searching and retrieval is not the mainpurpose of DARE, the search mechanism allowsa user to search for any asset within the domainbook. For some assets like documents the usercan perform full-text searching. For other assetslike diagrams and source code, metadatasearching is available.With the definition of users and roles in thedatabase there is a level of security that was notpresented in earlier versions of DARE.  It is alsopossible to add extra security in the Web server.Example     Figure 2 shows a snapshot of the DARE-Webimplementation of stemming algorithms.  The leftframe shows the domain book (in this caseimplemented as a Java applet)  and the searchservice.When the user clicks on any item of the outlinestructure, DARE-Web displays the content in theright frame. In the example, the user clicked onthe Code Analysis section of the outline and thenon the Porter asset. In this particular case theasset is document that describes the Porteralgorithm with additional links to view thecflow output for a C implementation.Oracle 8i InfrastructureStorage Representation(assets, metadata and XML)AssetManagerDomainViewServiceManager497Figure 2. A domain book for stemming algorithms using DARE-WebComparison     Table 2 summarizes all the main features ofDARE, DARE-COTS, and DARE-Web.Table 2. DARE, DARE-COTS and DARE-Webmain features.Feature DARE DARE-COTSDARE-WebModel Client-ServerCOTS WebStorage Flat files Flat files DatabaseClustereditorYes Yes No (*)ArchitectureeditorYes Yes No (*)Search No No YesSecurityfeaturesNo No YesPlatformindependentNo No Yes(*) DARE-Web does not currently provides thiscomponent.  However DARE-Web allows a userto upload the file to the system for check in/outpurposes.Conclusions     This paper reviewed the development ofdomain books using DARE, discussed severalimplementations of DARE, and presented a Webversion of DARE that provides support fordomain analysis.  The advantage of using theWeb version is that users can access the assetsfrom different places with a Web browser.Difficulties include lack of a reusableconfigurable graphical editor component forJava.We plan to continue to work on the Web versionand to explore different visual representations ofthe domain book’s assets.498AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank the anonymousreviewers for their comments and suggestions.ReferencesGuillermo Arango, Eric Schoen, and RobertPettengill. “Design as Evolution and Reuse”,Proceedings of the Second InternationalWorkshop on Software Reusability, IEEEComputer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA(1993), pp. 9-18.William Frakes, Rubén Prieto-Díaz, and ChrisFox. “DARE: Domain Analysis and ReuseEnvironment”, Annals of Software Engineering,Vol. 5 (1998), pp. 125-141.William Frakes, Rubén Prieto-Díaz, and ChrisFox. “DARE-COTS: A Domain Analsys SupportTool”, Proceedings of SCCC ’97, IEEEComputer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA(1997), pp. 73-77.Jerry Gao, Chris Chen, Yasufumi Toyoshima,and David Leung. “Engineering on the Internetfor Global Software Production”, IEEEComputer, May (1999), pp. 38-47.Ron Vetter. “Web-Based Enterprise Computing”,IEEE Computer, May (1999), pp. 113-116.Oracle 8i Reference Manual, Redwood Shores,CA (1999).499

DARE-Web: Domain Analysis in a Web Environment

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DARE-Web: Domain Analysis in a Web Environment

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