Feature Oriented Model Driven Development: A Case Study for Portlets

Model driven development (MDD) is an emerging paradigm for software construction that uses models to specify programs, and model transformations to synthesize executables. Feature oriented programming (FOP) is a paradigm for software product lines where programs are synthesized by composing features. feature oriented model driven development (FOMDD) is a blend of FOP and MDD that shows how products in a software product line can be synthesized in an MDD way by composing features to create models, and then transforming these models into executables. We present a case study of FOMDD on a product line of portlets, which are components of web portals. We reveal mathematical properties of portlet synthesis that helped us to validate the correctness of our abstractions, tools, and specifications, as well as optimize portlet synthesis.

1 Introduction

Model Driven Development (MDD) is an emerging paradigm for software development that specifies programs in domain-specific languages (DSLs), encourages greater degrees of automation, and exploits standards [10] [11] [24]. MDD uses models to represent a program. A model is written in a DSL that specifies particular details of a program's design. As an individual model captures limited information, a program is often specified by several different models. A model can be derived from other models by transformations, and program synthesis is the process of transforming high-level models into executables (which are also models).