Many businesses depend on legacy systems, which often use outdated technology that complicates maintenance and updates. Therefore, software modernization is essential, particularly data migration between different database schemas. Established methodologies, like model transformation and ETL tools, facilitate this migration. However, these methodologies require deep knowledge of database languages and both the source and target schemas. This necessity renders data migration an error-prone and cognitively demanding task. Our objective is to alleviate developers’ workloads during schema evolution by proposing DAMI-Framework. This framework incorporates a domain-specific language (DSL) and a parser to facilitate data migration between database schemas. DAMI-DSL simplifies schema mapping, while the parser automates SQL script generation. To evaluate DAMI-Framework, we conducted an empirical evaluation with 21 developers to assess their experiences using our DSL versus traditional SQL. The study allows us to measure their perceptions of the DSL properties and user experience. The participants praised DAMI-DSL for its readability and ease of use. The findings indicate that our framework has positive impact in data migration efforts compared to SQL scripts, by reducing the lines of code and characters required for the migration by 18.3% and 35.6%, respectively.

Software Product Lines (SPL) enable the creation of software product families with shared core components using feature models to model variability. Choosing features from a feature model to generate a product may not be sufficient in certain situations because the application engineer may need to be able to decide on configuration time the system’s elements to which a certain feature will be applied. Therefore, there is a need to select which features have to be included in the product but also to which of its elements they have to be applied. We introduce local features that are selectively applied to specific parts of the system during product configuration. We formalize local features using multimodels to establish relationships between local features and other elements of the system models. The paper includes examples illustrating the motivation for local features, a formal definition, and a domain-specific language for specification and implementation. Finally, we present a case study in a real scenario that shows how the concept of local features allowed us to define the variability of a complex system. The examples and the application case show that the proposal achieves higher customization levels at the application engineering phase.

Web engineering involves managing a high diversity of artifacts implemented in different languages and with different levels of granularity. Technological companies usually implement variable artifacts of Software Product Lines (SPLs) using annotations, being reluctant to adopt hybrid, often complex, approaches combining composition and annotations despite their benefits. This paper proposes a combined approach to support fine and coarse-grained variability for web artifacts. The proposal allows web developers to continue using annotations to handle fine-grained variability for those artifacts whose variability is very difficult to implement with a composition-based approach, but obtaining the advantages of the composition-based approach for the coarse-grained variable artifacts. A combined approach based on feature modeling that integrates annotations into a generic composition-based approach. We propose the definition of compositional and annotative variation points with custom-defined semantics, which is resolved by a scaffolding-based derivation engine. The approach is evaluated on a real-world web-based SPL by applying a set of variability metrics, as well as discussing its quality criteria in comparison with annotations, compositional, and combined existing approaches. Our approach effectively handles both fine and coarse-grained variability. The mapping between the feature model and the web artifacts promotes the traceability of the features and the uniformity of the variation points regardless of the granularity of the web artifacts. Using well-known techniques of SPLs from an architectural point of view, such as feature modeling, can improve the design and maintenance of variable web artifacts without the need of introducing complex approaches for implementing the underlying variability.

Abstract Even though different applications based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide different features and functions, they all share a set of common concepts (e.g., spatial data types, operations, services), a common architecture, and a common set of technologies. Furthermore, common structures appear repeatedly in different GIS, although they have to be specialized in specific application domains. Multilevel modeling is an approach to model-driven engineering (MDE) in which the number of metamodel levels is not fixed. This approach aims at solving the limitations of a two-level metamodeling approach, which forces the designer to include all the metamodel elements at the same level. In this paper, we address the application of multilevel modeling to the domain of GIS, and we evaluate its potential benefits. Although we do not present a complete set of models, we present four representative scenarios supported by example models. One of them is based on the standards defined by ISO TC/211 and the Open Geospatial Consortium. The other three are based on the EU INSPIRE Directive (territory administration, spatial networks, and facility management). These scenarios show that multilevel modeling can provide more benefits to GIS modeling than a two-level metamodeling approach.

Digital Libraries have become popular nowadays since important libraries all over the world started distributing their collections online, properly classified, and, in many cases, with access to the digital version of the resource. These programs have been beneficial to the general population as well as research groups in fields such as language and literature. Nonetheless, since their creation is a time-consuming and costly process, small organizations are forced to rely on obsolete or poorly designed software. However, most of the features, including the data model, are shared by this type of system, with minor variations depending on the type of resources to be handled. This article presents a Software Product Line (SPL) for the semi-automatic generation of Digital Libraries (DL). Our SPL allows developers to specify which DL features are required, which will define the data model variationand the generated source code. The specification is then transformed into a fully functional DL application with the specified features that is ready for deployment. We present the feature model, the SPL implementation, and acase study on three sample projects that enabled us to evaluate the resulting software, with a focus on development effort savings.

In this paper, we present a declarative domain-specific language (DSL) for the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS applications manage information with a spatial component, usually in the form of points, lines, polygons, or variants of these basic data types, in domains where the spatial information plays a central role. They provide the user with different functionalities on different application domains, but they are usually developed according to a common architecture and using a common set of technologies. Hence, they share a significant number of elements that make some aspects of their development quite repetitive. Our DSL allows developers to specify the entities, geographic layers, and maps of the applications using a declarative language. Then, the specification is transformed into a working GIS application. We present the language, its implementation, and a case study on two sample projects that allowed us to evaluate the resulting software, paying special attention to the savings in the development effort.

Geographic information systems (GIS) manage entities with a spatial component (typically, in the form of a point, line, or polygon defined according to a known geographic coordinate system), and provide specific operations to process them, and specific interfaces to visualize them. Although different GIS may provide a completely different set of functionalities, they all share a common set of concepts, architecture, and technologies. Therefore, in the development of GIS there are typically large parts of the system that can be very repetitive. In this paper, we present a domain-specific language to develop GIS from high-level declarative specifications. We present a metamodel for web-based GIS, and a domain-specific language based on that metamodel. We also present a usage example that shows how the language would be used in a real scenario.

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches even though the majority of studies encourage the use of composition-based approaches to implement Software Product Lines. Recent work tries to combine both approaches to get the complementary benefits. However, technological companies are reticent to adopt new development paradigms such as feature-oriented programming or aspect-oriented programming. Moreover, it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, to apply these programming models to web applications, mainly because of their multilingual nature, since their development involves multiple types of source code (Java, Groovy, JavaScript), templates (HTML, Markdown, XML), style sheet files (CSS and its variants, such as SCSS), and other files (JSON, YML, shell scripts). We propose to use the Common Variability Language as a composition-based approach and integrate annotations to manage fine grained variability of a Software Product Line for web applications. In this paper, we (i) show that existing composition and annotation-based approaches, including some well-known combinations, are not appropriate to model and implement the variability of web applications; and (ii) present a combined approach that effectively integrates annotations into a composition-based approach for web applications. We implement our approach and show its applicability with an industrial real-world system.