SUMMARY In this article, we present our experience with over a decade of strict simplicity orientation in the development and evolution of plug‐ins. The point of our approach is to enable our graphical modeling framework jABC to capture plug‐in development in a domain‐specific setting. The typically quite tedious and technical plug‐in development is shifted this way from a programming task to the modeling level, where it can be mastered also by application experts without programming expertise. We show how the classical plug‐in development profits from a systematic domain‐specific API design and how the level of abstraction achieved this way can be further enhanced by defining adequate building blocks for high‐level plug‐in modeling. As the resulting plug‐in models can be compiled and deployed automatically, our approach decomposes plug‐in development into three phases where only the realization phase requires plug‐in‐specific effort. By using our modeling framework jABC, this effort boils down to graphical, tool‐supported process modeling. Furthermore, we support the automatic completion of process sketches for executability. All this will be illustrated along the most recent plug‐in‐based evolution of the jABC framework, which witnessed quite some bootstrapping effects. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper shows how the reflexivity of Ecore can be exploited for incrementally bootstrapping domain-specific code generators in the model-driven and service-oriented code generation framework Genesys. Key to this technology is the EMF SIB Generator, which, based on a very small set of manually written code generator services called SIBs, incrementally generates services in a bootstrapping fashion. To this end, it leverages Ecore's metamodel, which is specified in Ecore itself, to iteratively enlarge the set of SIBs until all concepts of Ecore are covered. On this basis, the EMF SIB Generator can then be used to generate all services required for constructing a corresponding code generator for any given metamodel specified in Ecore. This approach can be staightforwardly applied to arbitrary metalevels and elegantly enables the model-driven and service-oriented construction of code generators for Ecore-based domain-specific languages.

In this paper, we leverage service-orientation as a means for combining the strengths of the UML-based code generator framework AndroMDA for generating static application aspects with code generators focussing on the dynamic aspects. The latter are developed with Genesys, a code generation framework that combines the ideas of model-driven development and service-orientation in order to enable a high-level engineering of code generators. This demonstrates a new level of reusability and even has the potential for full code generation, which elegantly eliminates the need for the typical round-trip engineering in model-driven development environments. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by means of an example from the field of bioinformatics.

Abstract Automatic code generation is an essential cornerstone of today’s model-driven approaches to software engineering. Thus a key requirement for the success of this technique is the reliability and correctness of code generators. This article describes how we employ standard model checking-based verification to check that code generator models developed within our code generation framework Genesys conform to (temporal) properties. Genesys is a graphical framework for the high-level construction of code generators on the basis of an extensible library of well-defined building blocks along the lines of the Extreme Model-Driven Development paradigm. We will illustrate our verification approach by examining complex constraints for code generators, which even span entire model hierarchies. We also show how this leads to a knowledge base of rules for code generators, which we constantly extend by e.g. combining constraints to bigger constraints, or by deriving common patterns from structurally similar constraints. In our experience, the development of code generators with Genesys boils down to re-instantiating patterns or slightly modifying the graphical process model, activities which are strongly supported by verification facilities presented in this article.

In this paper, we present the ConnectIT tool, which uses a graphical flow graph-based representation to express strategies for playing the connect-four game. The tool allows to transfer complex knowledge about theconnect-four game itself, simple algorithmic concepts, and modern high-level component-based modeling techniques from theoretical grounds into an inspiring and practical learning experience. For proving the feasibilityof this approach, we applied the tool in a project with pupils, who had no experience in computer sciences at all. We demonstrate that solely based on intuition and knowledge about the connect-four game, the pupils wereable to build really competitive strategies.

Service orientation leads to a completely new understanding and a much more end-user oriented tailoring of software design. We advocate a new software development paradigm: eXtreme Model-Driven Design (XMDD), designed to continuously involve the customer/application expert throughout the whole system's life cycle, including development and software maintenance. As maintenance is predominantly an adaption to new user requirements or to other global conditions, empowering the application expert would change the scene: Customer/application experts could rapidly adapt the system to their changing requirements. Source code becomes "only" a by-product and the development focuses on the model level. This paper presents a new development paradigm which realizes these ideas.

In this paper we present the FormulaBuilder, a flexible tool for graph-based modelling and generation of formulae. The FormulaBuilder allows easy and intuitive creation of formulae by using basic components called Formula Building Blocks (FBBs) and arranging them as graphs according to the syntactic structure of a formula. Such a graph can then be validated and used to generate the corresponding formula on the basis of a specific syntax which is chosen from a list of syntaxes supported by the FormulaBuilder.An important application of the FormulaBuilder is the formal specification of properties that describe the requirements of a system. Such property specifications are usually needed by verification tools like model checkers, that help software engineers to detect errors in a specified system. The FormulaBuilder allows users to model property specifications as formula graphs by using commonly-occurring specification patterns.