The Prototype of a Tool for Model-Driven Development of Java Applications

Rok Štebe (2009) The Prototype of a Tool for Model-Driven Development of Java Applications. MSc thesis.

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Abstract

The masters' dissertation titled The Prototype of a Tool for Model-Driven Development of Java Applications details concepts, recommendations, techniques and methods of model-driven development. We aimed to achieve three main goals: to establish the usability of one of the best open source tools for developing domain-specific languages, to develop the prototype of a tool for model-driven development of Java applications based on it, and to establish the actual usability of the presented modeling concepts with a selected group of 1st year students. The introduction of the dissertation serves as a broad-reaching overview of the field of model-driven development. It begins with a detailed description of meta-modeling and domain-specific languages. That is followed by the description of the most frequent approaches to executing transformations between models and the presentation of methods of combining hand-written and automatically generated programming code. The introduction ends with the list of some of the most influential research groups from this field and stresses the need for unified standards, tools and methodologies to be introduced. The following chapter focuses on problems of Java programming and presents the ideas for the execution of the practical part of the dissertation. It is followed by the description of GME, a popular open source environment for developing domain-specific languages. We describe the structure of this tool in detail, explain the significance of OCL constraints and present the reasons for using interpreters. The central part of the dissertation has a detailed description of the prototype of the tool for model-driven development of Java applications we built within the scope of the practical part of our dissertation. It begins by detailing how the programming concepts were described with an appropriate metamodel, followed by the presentation of the graphic symbols for visualizing domain concepts into models, then a definition of the required limitations with the OCL constraint language and a focus on the method of executing the interpreter, which is used to transform the designed models into the appropriate Java programming code. The final part of the dissertation describes the survey we conducted among 1st year students to gain information about experiences with using the prototype. We present the results and compare them to the findings and conclusions that we reached ourselves.

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