Bidirectional programming allows developers to write programs that will produce transformations that extract data from a source document into a view. The same transformations can then be used to update the source in order to propagate the changes made to the view, provided that the transformations satisfy two essential properties.

The integration of domain-specific concepts in a model-driven engineering (MDE) approach raises a number of interesting research questions. There are two possibilities to represent these concepts. The first one focuses on models that contain domain-specific concepts only, i.e. domain-specific modelling languages (DSML). The second one advocates the integration of domain-specific concepts in general-purpose models, using what we will refer to in this paper as domain-specific modelling annotation languages (DSMAL). In this position paper, we argue that each approach is particularly suited for specific activities and specific actors, and show how they can be developed and used together. We also highlight the challenges created by the use of two representations, such as the evaluation of models OCL constraints and the synchronisation between the two representations. As an illustration, we present rbacUML, our approach for integrating role-based access control (RBAC) concepts into an MDE approach.

Following the “convention over configuration” paradigm, model-driven development (MDD) generates code to implement the “default” behaviour that has been specified by a template separate from the input model, reducing the decision effort of developers. For flexibility, users of MDD are allowed to customise the model and the generated code in parallel. A synchronisation of changed model or code is maintained by reflecting them on the other end of the code generation, as long as the traceability is unchanged. However, such invariant traceability between corresponding model and code elements can be violated either when (a) users of MDD protect custom changes from the generated code, or when (b) developers of MDD change the template for generating the default behaviour. A mismatch between user and template code is inevitable as they evolve for their own purposes. In this paper, we propose a two-layered invariant traceability framework that reduces the number of mismatches through bidirectional transformations. On top of existing vertical (model↔code) synchronisations between a model and the template code, a horizontal (code↔code) synchronisation between user and template code is supported, aligning the changes in both directions. Our blinkit tool is evaluated using the data set available from the CVS repositories of a MDD project: Eclipse MDT/GMF.

It has been argued that security perspectives, of which access control is one, should be taken into account as early as possible in the software development process. Towards that goal, we present in this paper a tool supporting our modelling approach to specify and verify access control in accordance to the NIST standard Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). RBAC is centred on mapping users to their roles in an organisation, to make access control permissions easier to set and maintain. Our modelling approach uses only standard UML mechanisms, like metamodels and OCL constraints, and improves on existing approaches in various ways: designers don't have to learn new languages or adopt new tools or methodologies; user-role and role-permission assignments can be specified separately to be reused across models; access control is specified over class and activity diagrams, including 'anti-scenarios'; access control is automatically verified. The tool is built on top of an existing modelling IDE and allows for automatic verification of models according to our RBAC modelling approach, while providing users with the ability to easily identify and correct errors in the model when they are detected.

S.357-358